At cocktail parties, I played the part of a successful businessman’s wife to perfection. I smiled, I made polite chit-chat, and I dressed the part. Denial and rationalization were two of my most effective tools...

That is the problem with repressed memory and dissociative identity disorder. Your mind represses certain traumas for reasons of pure survival. And then you learn that to survive as an adult, you must uncover the...

Not wanting the girls to endure the shame of a crazy mother, I spent my days acting as normal as possible. I walked through life, an actor in a Leave it to Beaver episode, determined...

I honestly didn’t believe I could bear any more suffering. I was convinced that the child within me was just too young to endure all this, much less understand it. She just wanted to be...

On its own, my internal dissociated part now came to the surface, and I found myself hiding from everyone. I still was not connecting it to the dream I’d had. At one time I had...

This new co-consciousness brought me to a state of awareness in which my core personality was directly able to experience “her” personality. Being co-conscious with her, he explained, would stop me from experiencing the feeling...

Denial returned, like a nagging cough you can never quite shake. Actually, it was always close at hand, and even though “satanic ritual abuse” did describe what had happened to me when I was a...

I’m back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She’s lying on an alter, and they’re hurting her. The bastards. They’re hurting her. There is blood all over...

I am truly crazy, I told myself. It’s over. I am not fixable. I cannot tell Tom. I cannot even tell Francisco. So I won’t tell anyone. My brain seemed out of control. Tom does...