Powerful Answers & Surprising Help For People Traumatized as Children
Next Part If You Don’t Have Alters
Healing your “Inner Child” / Inner Pain
Help for Alters (Insiders) and Sufferers of Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.)
or Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
If you suffered trauma as a child,
the traumatized part of you could
have separated from the rest of you
and need special attention.
Understanding this can be
crucial for healing.
Is anyone too macho or mature to have ever been a child? No matter how much you might hate it, you are human.
We all long to push a distressing experience out of our mind and just get on with life without mentally coming to terms with it, but this is not nearly as heroic nor as helpful as we would like to think. Denying the reality of an inner wound does not prevent a suppressed part of us from acutely suffering, nor does it stop the pain from spilling over to the rest of our lives in ways that can make the cause frustratingly hard to identify. Unlike the power of resolving inner pain, the burden of trying to suppress pain is a dead weight keeping too many of us from the joyous freedom that would otherwise be ours.
I challenge you to embrace reality, embarking on a terrifyingly exciting adventure of self-discovery that could lead to more peace and fulfilment than you have ever dared believe possible. You can end inner pain.
Nevertheless, desperate times call for desperate measures. If, for example, an emergency were sufficiently serious, you might be brave enough to sacrifice a limb, cutting it off to save the rest of you.
Pain avoidance is not nearly as simple, however, as trying to cut unpleasant memories out of our lives. Consider someone with a seriously wounded leg. Pain in the injured leg might push him to opt for amputation but after surgery he could be devastated to find himself hounded by phantom limb pain in which he suffers pain as if the amputated limb were still there and as wounded as ever. Likewise, cutting ourselves off from painful memories is more drastic than we realize and rarely as effective in ending our distress as we suppose.
Such are the mysteries of inner (emotional) pain that to deepen our insight it will help to continue to look briefly at something slightly easier to understand: physical pain. If a gang of thugs kept beating you, it would hurt, of course, but by releasing such chemicals as adrenalin, your brain would temporarily shut down some of your consciousness of pain, thus helping you to flee from your attackers. Running when seriously injured brings great risk of inflaming the injuries – perhaps raising the risk to life-threatening levels – but the temporary necessity of escape overrides other vital concerns. So during the emergency, your mind’s partial suppression of your awareness of pain is a precious gift of God. Despite your understandable longing never to feel pain, however, once you are safe, continuing to have little consciousness of pain could be counter-productive. Without pain signalling the extent of your injuries – and hence alerting you to the urgency of seeking medical treatment – your well-being could be seriously impaired.
This natural response to physical trauma parallels our natural response to severe inner pain. In the short term, the suppression of your inner pain can be a blessing by helping you cope with the necessities of life. For as long as this suppression continues, however, it will keep you from healing.
Being human means we have an inbuilt need not merely to store facts but to process events both mentally and emotionally. That does not necessarily mean crying, but accessing the full range of human emotions and analyzing the experience until we fully come to terms with it, before finally offloading the pain in an emotionally healthy way. When we suffer something highly unpleasant we long to disconnect from the entire event and live as if it had never happened. But the memory and the need to respond to it in a fully human manner remains a part of us.
So to emotionally disconnect from the event is to disconnect from an essential part of who we are – a part of us that continues to exist and feel and attempts to grapple with the experience in an authentically human way – no matter how much we wish that part of us would die. We either help that part of our humanity find peace or we keep our lives in needless turmoil.
When people have something so horrible in their past that their mind recoils from the very thought of it, we can understand the mind trying to suppress all memory of the event. A simple blocking of the past would not work, however, if a person is continually reminded of it by, for example, having to endure similar trauma every few days.
If the trauma is on-going, though less than twenty-four hours every day of every week, the mind has to employ a more sophisticated approach to maintaining sanity by giving itself a big a reprieve as possible whenever the trauma is not occurring. The mind has to divide itself so that part of it has the capacity to function whenever the person is being re-traumatized and another part is kept from awareness of what is happening so that it is able to function at times that are less traumatic without being hampered by conscious awareness of the horrors that occurred yesterday and the paralyzing fear that they might recur tomorrow.
Additional types of trauma – or trauma multiplying beyond the capacity of one part of the mind to cope – can cause further fragmenting of the mind. That way, no part has to cope with every horrific memory and the consciousness that more such horrors are likely. The mind-crippling task of trying to deal with everything at once is broken down into smaller, though still horrific, pieces.
It is not only memories that are compartmentalized because the person has to be able to function – often at quite a sophisticated level – while being traumatized. So intellectual abilities have to be divided up as well. Some abilities can be replicated in another part of the brain, just like a right-handed people can develop the side of their brain that controls their left hand so that they can get better at writing with their left hand. Not all abilities are replicated, however, with the result these people are usually more skilled than they realize until they learn about all their other parts.
Far from being a freak, these people have, from an early age, stumbled upon an ingenious mental strategy for coping with situations that are almost beyond human endurance.
As a child’s brain grows it becomes increasingly rigid and the ability to compartmentalize itself this way is lost if the process is not initiated by around about seven years of age. If someone learns the technique when young, however, the person can continue further compartmentalizing his/her brain later in life.
So traumatized children – especially those who are artistically and/or intellectually gifted – have a remarkable ability. They can suppress inner pain by splitting into a functioning part of them that is fully aware of their suffering, and a part of them that is much less aware. It has been theorized that the split might come about through them trying to cope by intensely imagining that the horrific experience is happening to someone else, but even babies can split. Because each part of the person grapples alone with a different set of events, each part has a unique awareness of certain emotional pain, and hence a distinct consciousness.
Many people call these disconnected parts of a person alters. Sometimes they are referred to as insiders. Some people simply use the term parts. I very much like this last term, even though I don’t use it much in my pages because the word is so common that it would not help search engine users find the webpage. “Alter” sounds too alien and even “insider” sounds a little spooky. “Part” helps reinforce that each alter is a part of the one person. Each time a new alter is discovered, it is finding a vital part of oneself that you were not even aware was missing.
Alters act like persons within a person. They are part of the full person (although they might not realize it) and they make their own decisions and have feelings, intelligence, and an individual personality.
Writes one of Alice’s alters to one of Jake’s alters (two of my friends who have let me share this with you – names changed to protect anonymity):
I want you to know that I respect and admire you for your courage to split off and keep this secret from Jake so that he could survive. What a sacrifice you have made. It is like agreeing to live with a knife in your heart for the sake of the others.
The benefit of splitting is that the part of the person not conscious of the worst aspects of the trauma is better able to soldier on with life’s daily demands. As we have seen also applies to a wounded person fleeing an attacker, a lowered consciousness of the severity of the trauma can, in the short term, prove a clever coping mechanism, but there is a serious downside.
A part of you could have been so desperate to protect the rest of you by keeping unpleasant feelings and information from you that it severs lines of communication with you. The unintended consequence, however, is that the restricted flow of information operates in both directions. The price of making painful information inaccessible to you is that vital information you discover later in life cannot get back to the hurting part of you.
That part of you left to cope alone with the full force of the trauma not only continues to reel in pain, it never gets to move on or grow up. The isolated, hurting part of you remains trapped at approximately the same mental age and limited knowledge, year after year. Usually it cannot benefit from new insights you gain later in life – insights that would otherwise have enabled the hurting part of you to heal. For example, the inner child in a sex abuse survivor remains unable to see through the abuser’s former lies that the adult part of the person can see through. So the damaging power of those haunting lies continues, and the person fails to heal.
Similarly, the suppressed, hurting part cannot access the spiritual understanding that the person gained later in life. Thankfully, the disconnected part can be taught these liberating, healing truths but usually this can happen only if that part of the person is acknowledged and dialog takes place in which these truths are taught as one would teach anyone else of similar “age” and experiences. Unless this happens, the deeply hurting, unhealed part will remain with the person for life, and make its presence felt in mysteriously vague, unpleasant ways.
Sadly, fear of the unknown and false shame make it exceedingly difficult for most people to face the possibility that they have alters. In actual fact, if I discovered I had multiple personalities, I’d be excited about it, but I have the advantage of understanding all the benefits flowing from such a diagnosis.
No matter how much you suppress alters and live in denial, if you have alters, they are an inseparable part of you. Keeping them suppressed would sentence you to remaining only a shadow of the wonderful person you could be. Yes, when alters first surface they have pain and problems, but the key is not to try to rid yourself of these essential parts of you but to help them heal – and this is fairly easy. Anyone trying to suppress alters is like someone with injured fingers and toes who, instead of tending the wounds, wants to hack off all his arms and legs! Each alter has unique gifts or abilities, such as creativity or a special skill or valuable character trait or a key to healing that will empower you to soar beyond what you could otherwise achieve.
Next Part If You Don’t Have Alters