My new video is a review of the book, “Dear Little Ones. Dissociative Identity Disorder for Young Alters”. It’s at https://youtu.be/UetqiBXvolk Trigger Warnings for video – mentions of child abuse, but no details.
Trigger Warnings: Brief and non-detailed mentions of Child sexual abuse, Gaslighting, Trauma
Forced Positivity is how others pave my road to Hell. “Good vibes only” can turn inwards so I downplay how rotten I feel to avoid being interrogated about why I don’t join in their fun. The stereotype of the fat and jolly person definitely feeds into this, as well as the Black and smiling woman/femme stereotype. As much as I share on Instagram & my blog, it is only the tip of the iceberg you can see. Forced Positivity hurts me, and when I ask people to stop doing that, it ALWAYS goes badly, regardless of how polite I request. Not only do people not want to know about the effects of abuse that Survivors have to live with, but they happily guilt-trip and gaslight me when I speak up about their behaviour.
Trauma Anniversaries can be any day of the week, month or year. The abuse and violence I survived happened on most days, but the days that stick out the most are when others expected me to celebrate and pretend everything was just dandy. It was 15 years ago when I stopped freaking out every single Sunday evening at 7:00pm. It’s a specific time when one of my sexually abusive sisters used to get me alone. I believe that it was the easiest date to deal with as a survivor, because nobody was forcing me to be happy on a Sunday. I haven’t been able to do the same with Christmas and my Birthday yet, and that is mostly because other people make such a flipping big deal out of those dates.
Trauma Anniversaries and Forced Positivity become deadly partners when the trauma occurred on a day of celebration. For those like me who have zero contact with my family, it can still feel incredibly lonely despite of all the pain that day brings. I miss cooking Christmas dinner for others; the noise of my nephews and nieces, and the yearly chance to seeing my Uncle Les who was a good man. I miss the fantasy that I belonged somewhere; that I had a family who loved me. It is incredibly hard to let that fantasy go, and it’s even harder when most Black folk and People of Colour believe family is everything, despite how dangerous they are…
Listen to survivors when they tell you they don’t want to take part in any activity you happen to love. Don’t call us a Scrooge, Grinch or Killjoy. When I don’t want to celebrate, it will take away exactly ZERO percent of your fun. Don’t try to cheer me up, don’t brush it off or tell me I should be over it by now. If you want to give me a gift, use the money and make a donation to a charity for Survivors of Abuse or to a refuge. Just stop being a wanker and leave me alone when I ask you to.
Trigger Warnings: Ableism. Non-detailed brief mentions of childhood abuse and incest.
Trauma and Time Travel
I used to be obsessed with time travel stories in science fiction and fantasy. From H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, to multiple episodes of TV shows like Star Trek and Stargate SG1, time travel and time manipulation was something that beguiled me. I kept my thoughts to myself, but I knew I would do anything to make it into a reality; to go back and change the past so I was never abused.
When I was diagnosed as having Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), I realised that flashbacks were a form of time travel, and a very effective one at that. There was no Steampunk inspired device, no futuristic faster than light machines, and no way for me to control when my mind would yank me back into the traumatic past. Flashbacks were not only sights, but tastes, temperatures, and a myriad of senses that moved past the five I only thought existed. My flashbacks were in high fidelity. In one moment I would reach for a door handle, and the next I would find myself stepping into the back seat of an Austin Cambridge, travelling down the North Circular road. My journeys to the past were not flashes of memories, but slow exposures that retained absolutely everything that happened at that time. Events repeated itself over and again. I was forced to experience my fears, yet feel unable to change even a fraction of it. I was never prepared for when flashbacks would occur, and this was especially the case when it came to flashback-nightmares, when I would time travel whilst asleep.
Where C-PTSD dragged the adult me into the past without notice, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) transported a fragment of me forward in time from the past to the present day. This fragment had never aged as I grew up. My fragments were stuck in 1972, 1984 or a nebulous slice of time, depending on which Alternate Personality came to the fore, with a different name, a different gender, and a lack of understanding that the host body is alive in the twenty-first century. This isn’t time manipulation, but a very real type of time travel that is cruel because i have little choice but to embody that part of myself as a child, with a child’s voice, vocabulary and mannerisms. My youngest Alter, Lizzie may look nothing like me, yet she is part of me, separate and often confused as to why her family are not around and so much has changed many decades later.
Dissociative identity disorder and the presence of Alters is something shown in science fiction, horror and fantasy, but which is almost always seen as a negative. The Stargate SG1 episode, Life Boat, is one of the only positive examples of a character with this condition. But a single episode can do little to counteract blockbuster films like Psycho or Split, which has caused even more stigma.
What happens when part of me refuses to grow up? How do I manage to exist when an Alter will not move forward in time for long periods, and then pop up thinking they are still in the same era they were created? Since I was diagnosed with DID, that my Alters each hold a section of my trauma that I as the host body could never manage unaided. One of the major causes of DID is long-term repeated trauma starting at a very young age. My brain was still developing when the abuse started, and it was unable to grow in a typical way. Parts of me split off and became independent, defusing bombs in my mind that had a high chance of killing me outright. With such dangerous work done by young parts of my personalities, it is no wonder they were never able to grow up with me as time passed. Instead they settled in their own pockets of time until I as the host learned to speak about the past – not only of the abuse, but of the way I knew skills I had never learned, displayed traits that made no sense to me, and how my voice would change many times over the course of a single conversation.
I had my wish it seemed; time travel and time manipulation were real, and I was part of it. I was my own mechanism for this transport. But having C-PTSD and DID are more than ways to trace the road back to the past. They are both ways to cope with trauma, and a way to cope with the threat of trauma happening again.
On occasion, I feel adrift in time and space. My host personality once surfaced when I was on a train travelling to where I used to live thirty years ago. I had no memory of how I had come to be there, but I as the host knew I had to get off the train and make my way back to my present home. Sometimes I feel as if I have lived several lifetimes, when in fact part of me was stuck in the 1970’s for over forty years. The BBC series Life on Mars comes to mind when I feel like that.
Trauma at a young age can often affect how a child’s brain develops. One of the brain’s functions is to process the passing of time. This process got rather messed up for me. As an adult I realise that my desire to change the past – to stop my parents from ever meeting, is a sad fiction. I would need to be born in order to create a way to go into the past. Plus my obsession with time travel made it so I could sidestep facing painful truths and realities that I as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse have to live with every day and with every tick of the clock hands.
Some of my favourite science fiction episodes that involve time travel and time manipulation:
Stargate SG1: Window of Opportunity
Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Far Beyond the Stars
Trigger Warning: non-detailed mentions of the affects of surviving ritual and/or spiritual abuse
Note 1: I see the word Ritual used a lot in Black & POC community healing. There are people including survivors of abuse, who use this word as a way to celebrate and empower themselves and others. THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT THEM IN ANY WAY.
Note 2: Ritual Abuse is not only Satanic Ritual Abuse, despite what we read in the media. There is a good webpage that explores the different kinds, and the help that is available for survivors. https://information.pods-online.org.uk/demystifying-ritual-abuse/. PODS – Positive Outcomes for Dissociation is a site that also provides resources for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder and OSDD
Words and their meanings change over time – that’s a feature and not a bug. Reclaimed words however can still wound me if I have spent most of my life hearing them in certain contexts.
As a survivor of abuse, the R-word is incredibly triggering to me, even in safer spaces. For example: I joined a healing group meeting on Zoom a few weeks ago, and had to leave about five minutes in, as the facilitator kept using the R-word to describe what we would do. I could have spoken up, but to do so would make me feel even more vulnerable than I already was. In addition, I am often unable to communicate normally when I’ve been triggered. I have too many memories of abusive people using the R-word to mask their physical, sexual and spiritual violence to vulnerable adults and children in my past, for it to be a neutral term to me now. Other words like Spells and Magic, don’t bother me as much, but Witchcraft does. I know other survivors may have different connotations to these words. I am writing from my own lived experience.
In decolonised healing practices, R-word and W-word are reclaimed from a time where indigenous spirituality was outlawed or at the least mocked and disparaged. The whyte Halloween/Hollywood version of W-word that many see as a bit of harmless fun in the media, isn’t what I personally feel when I hear them. I see sinister ways to control people in a non-consensual manner. I see practices that are distorted from their original intent, often mixed with Christianity (or other dominant religion) to make a truly toxic mix.
Words can carry a lot of weight to people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and other types of trauma-related mental health issues. There may not be another word but those above that encapsulates a process involved in healing in a non-western way, but checking that others are okay with these words, is a way to be more inclusive. Speaking for myself, I’ve already been cut out of most healing practices because of my size, ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation. And I’d like a chance to feel better too, without being triggered by the things supposed to help me
Trigger Warning: Sexual abuse, Sexual assault, Rape, child sexual abuse survivors
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Repeat victims of sexual abuse/assault are often left in an isolated place. Few enough people (including medical staff) want to discuss it happening once. Even less want to acknowledge that it has happened multiple times. I agonised for decades over the fact I’ve been sexually assaulted by several different people & groups over the course of my life. It was only a little while ago that I heard so many survivors of child sexual abuse grow up conditioned to be compliant/not make noise/not kick up a fuss about things. This conditioning often follows us into adulthood, where it is difficult to to judge other people’s intentions and our own safety. We have learned to ignore our instincts, to not question others who behave inappropriately to us. Other things like body language can get screwed up when growing up in with sexual abuse. Body language is not a conscious thing for me, but other abusive people pick up on my wish to not be seen, and my ability to shrink myself so I’m less of a target. These are all things I did to survive as a child. I shouldn’t have had to do any of this, and we survivors should have grown up being protected and loved. All of this isn’t to say that survivors will inevitably be assaulted again, but rather to say: if it’s happened to you many times, it’s still not your fault. You can refuse to hold the guilt and shame. You can be there for yourself, not matter how physically and emotionally isolated you are. You can know that you are not alone.
I’m sending you all my love in your journey to heal.
The following articles go into this in more details: https://tinyurl.com/t3ay5ex
And this one by the World Health Organisation has lots of further links
This isn’t Epping Forest, but a pic of Muir Woods that I took on my visit to San Francisco in 2013.
Thanks to @DualityDreamers on Instagram for reminding me of this poem, written by several of my Alter Personalities: Forest Jacq, Larry, Munro, Shadoe, and Outside Jacq (me, the host)
This is probably the most open I’ve been about Dissociative Identity Disorder, and it’s no coincidence that this illness is one of the most demonised in mental health (along with Psychosis & Schizophrenia). Before I was diagnosed with DID, I only knew about it through horror films by its old name (Multiple Personality Disorder). People with DID are not the evil villains in life – if you want to see that, look at the people who hurt and abused us when we were so young.
Trigger Warnings in the poem: Mentions of child abuse, but nothing graphic or detailed.
Written in Shadows 