If You Don’t Have Alters

You don’t need multiple personalities to have a wounded inner child. A woman, who as far I know does not have alters, has given me permission to share the following:

Just over a year ago I purchased a Christian CD of baby lullabies and sent it to my new grandson. I kept thinking about that CD. The next time I was in town I purchased one for myself. I would have never thought of it on my own. I’ve never known anyone to suggest such a thing. It was a revelation from the Holy Spirit. For weeks that turned into months I had this music playing softly while I read my Bible and prayed. I was absolutely amazed at the nurturing and healing that came to me from such music in the background. It was an inexpensive investment that paid big dividends for me.

You just might want to give some thought to purchasing a children’s Christian CD to see if it doesn’t help heal the inner child in you that was neglected (or at least not supported very well) in childhood. Sometimes we need to become that little child again before we can move on.

How Can You Know if You Have an Alter?

Should you have alters, becoming aware of this fact is unlikely to be easy. After all, they formed to keep things from you. Moreover, needless fears and misconceptions about the implications of having alters cause most people’s minds to recoil from the thought of having alters. The result is high psychological pressure for people with alters to remain unaware of their alters. So despite all the healing advantages of finding that you have alters, things are stacked against you discovering them.

Winning the trust of a terrified jackrabbit might be less of a challenge, but the only sure way to discover an alters is to so win their confidence that they decide to talk to you regularly. Until alters feels safe to do this, you can only look for vague clues. Should you have alters, do not expect to have any awareness of, at best, more than a few of the symptoms mentioned below.

Although some people with alters have obvious gaps in their memory of the distant past, there are some who, even before healing begins, have a more detailed and complete memory of their childhood than average people who have never had alters. This is because alters do not necessarily retain sole memory of certain events. What they keep to themselves (until they begin to heal) is the deepest emotional reaction to certain traumatic events. Rather than mere facts, it is particularly emotional ownership of these events that they keep from the rest of the person.

So people with undetected alters might not necessarily have missing years. They might, however, have the occasional missing moment in everyday life that cannot be attributed to alcohol or drugs. They might, for instance, lose keys or other personal items and find them in places where they cannot recall putting them. Other possibilities include goods appearing that they cannot recall purchasing, inexplicable bank account withdrawals, finding themselves somewhere with no recollection of how they got there, or having no memory of doing things in the recent past that other people claim to have witnessed them doing.

Sometimes people with alters discover that they can protect themselves from self-harm or other unwanted behavior by hiding from themselves knives, credit cards or whatever. They know where they placed the objects, and yet putting them in an unusual place works when an alter does not observe the hiding.

If you have sole access to your computer, check History on your Internet Browser to see if you have visited websites you cannot recall having seen. If you retain electronic copies of sent emails, check them to see if you recognize them all. An itemized phone bill, credit card account, or anything else tracking your actions might also be revealing.

Of course, we all have memory lapses but with alters, lapses are usually more pronounced than for most people. Some people have even feared Alzheimer’s, when their lapses were simply due to a suppressed part of the person taking over for a while and doing and thinking things that it keeps hidden from the rest of the person. It is tragically common for people with alters to be called liars when their denials are simply because they genuinely don't remember certain things.

Until healing progresses, alters are particularly active when the rest of the person is asleep. You could wake up to find things moved. It might just be sleepwalking but it could be more.

I provide e-mail support for abuse survivors. With several different survivors I have suddenly received an e-mail that seems out of character for that person. Besides the subject matter seeming unusual, the grammar and spelling is often more childlike than their usual standard. Sometimes I initially thought that maybe the person wrote the e-mail while under the influence of drugs or alcohol but often it turns out that it is the child part of them temporarily taking over. When I send a copy of the e-mail to the person, he or she is often shocked, having no recollection of having ever written it.

Had the correspondence been handwritten, most likely there would be a noticeable change in handwriting. So another clue to the presence of alters is changes in handwriting in, for example, one’s journal. In fact, keeping a journal is a good idea, especially doing so at different times of the day (different times and situations are more likely to reveal different alters). You might be surprised what you find later when re-reading your journal.

Some adult survivors sometimes find themselves acting in a childlike way. They might, for example, have a collection of children’s toys. Again, to some extent, we all have times when we act a little childlike, but when it is more pronounced, it could be the inner child temporarily making its presence felt.

Another possible indicator of an alter is sometimes having certain abilities and sometimes not. You might, for example, have created artwork or poems of a standard far beyond what you think yourself capable of. Or you might be mystified as to why you are occasionally unable to do something – perhaps to spell or read music or some other skill – that at other times you can easily do.

Since she was seven, a friend of mine was hopeless at mathematics and yet she kept getting high marks in the subject. She could ace a test, go home and find herself quite unable to solve simple math problems. At college she elected to complete the same algebra course with the same teacher not once, not twice but three times because, despite continually getting high grades, she didn’t have a clue about the subject. Determined not to let it beat her, she even tried to do the course a fourth time, but her teacher forbade her on the grounds that she was too good at the subject to keep repeating it. It was not until she was in her late thirties that she discovered an alter of hers, formed at age seven, who not only specialized in mathematics but who, out of fear of being pushed aside by other parts of the person, deliberately kept the rest of the person mathematically ignorant.

Another possible clue is having extended times in which one feels unreal, as if in a dream or not really there. Some describe it as like observing everything from behind a glass wall. It is known as co-consciousness.

Another possibility, is sometimes thinking of oneself as “we” or “us,” or feeling as if there is another person inside of you.

Hearing voices that seem to come from inside you is yet another possibility. What these voices say could seem a little strange – as might be expected from someone who has suffered bizarre and terrifying abuse – but, in contrast to people with certain other conditions, the voices are relatively rational and sane.

Another clue is occasionally having two conflicting emotions; perhaps, for example, feeling happy and yet deep inside feeling sad and trapped.

All of the above are common symptoms of what therapists call Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.). Not everyone has every symptom and any supposed symptoms should only be regarded as clues, not diagnostic proof. For example, an embarrassed woman confided to a friend of mine that she kept losing her keys. “What is emotionally upsetting you?” asked my discerning friend. The problem turned out not to be D.I.D., nor Alzheimer’s, but simply a reaction to stress.

There are questionnaire-type psychological tests designed to diagnose D.I.D. They can only be administered by professionals and are expensive.

See Psychological Tests to Diagnose Dissociative Identity Disorder. http://www.net-burst.net/counselor therapist/psychological-test-DID.htm

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