In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly...

What does a woman feel when she is hit? My mother slapped me when I was a child – on two occasions, to the point of pure hysteria; I never liked it. Those who are...

But as much as this is a soldier’s reason d’etre, it is not often that you hear a soldier explicitly talk about ‘killing’. The k-word as a verb is instead often disguised and supplanted by...

Escape from reality. In some instances, dissociation induces people to imagine that they have some kind of mastery over intractable environmental difficulties. Dissociation is often implicated in magical thinking or self-induced trance states. This aspect...

How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life?...

When I was cooking I enjoyed a sense of being ‘out’ of myself. The action of dicing vegetables and warming oil made my hands tingle and my thoughts switch to a different hemisphere, right brain...

We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories...

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

Changes in Meaning:Finally, chronically traumatized people lose faith that good things can happen and people can be kind and trustworthy. They feel hopeless, often believing that the future will be as bad as the past,...

Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment.

Another of the difficulties of having DID is the denial. DID is a disorder of denial. It has to be because if the original person knew about the alters and felt their pain, they would...

Joe knew that for some, really for most, the derivations of belladonna that blurred their vision and caused their hearts to race would, as well, hasten their forgetting of detail. They would not recall, not...

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...

It is now recognised that dissociation is a way of forgetting, for a time. The mind siphons off the bad memories into a separate part, and reclaiming those hidden-away memories us a complex process. So,...

lost time.” You may find writings or drawings which you must have done, but do not remember producing. Perhaps you find child-sized clothing or toys in your home but have no children. You might also...

The primary treatment modality for DID is individual outpatient psychotherapy.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is...

Those of us who work in the field of trauma and abuse, whether psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, doctors, counselors, or psychotherapists, have been provided with beautiful tools for understanding the impact of trauma. We become...

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the...

Janna knew – Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn’t make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West,...

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

Parts of you are phobic of anger and generally terrified and ashamed of angry dissociative parts. There is often tremendous conflict between anger-avoidant and anger-fixated parts of an individual. Thus, an internal and perpetual cycle...

Weird? Absurd? That’s how it seemed to me. I had these forces, these compunctions, these alternative personalities inside me, driving me. It was like being a jack-in-the-box and I was unsure which personality was going...

Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told — even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that — they were not...

Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be...

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 was increasingly both horrified and sceptical about these memories – I had no recall of these things at all, though I couldn’t imagine why I’d want to make it all up either. It felt...

Those who are aware of their condition and experience themselves as “multiple” might refer to themselves as “we” rather than “I.” I shall use the term “multiple” at times, in respect for their internal experience....

Treatment for DID should adhere to the basic principles of psychotherapy and psychiatric medical management, and therapists should use specialized techniques only as needed to address specific dissociative symptomatology.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in...

Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one’s own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding...

Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation...

If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours on Saturday morning in the library. Was that normal? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I felt less prone to...

The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can...

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest...

Specific parts of you personality may be angry and are usually easily evoked. because these parts are dissociated, anger remains an emotion that is not integrated for you as a whole person. Even though individuals...

The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the...

The government researchers,aware of the information in the professional journals, decided to reverse the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They decided to use selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of committing...

Secret ceremonies in which malevolent men and women cloaked in hooded robes, hiding behind painted faces and chanting demonic incantations while inflicting sadistic wounds on innocent children lying on makeshift alters, or tied to inverted...

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...

it felt increasingly, as I became more whole, that I had made it all up, and that I was a phoney. I had to come to some place of acceptance. If I made it all...

The “apparently normal personality” – the alter you view as “the client”You should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the “real” person,...

real” or more important than any other.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

As Lynn began getting psychologically better, she took me to a variety of sites. She taught me how to read trail markers. In the end, Lynn’s stories could not be denied. She was not only...

When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream. A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but...

numbs out.” It denies and distorts our Child Within, and is often judgmental.

This dissociation from the body extends to emotional disengagement. Without access to his feelings a man can’t help but lose track of who he is, what his priorities are and what is normal for him.

Some dissociative parts of the personality, living in trauma time, may experience the same emotion no matter the situation, such as fear, rage, shame, sadness, yearning and even some positive ones just as joy.* Other...

I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if...

Cheryl was aided in her search by the Internet. Each time she remembered a name that seemed to be important in her life, she tried to look up that person on the World Wide Web....

Loftus grew up with a cold father who taught her nothing about love but everything about angles. A mathematician, he showed her the beauty of the triangle’s strong tip, the circumference of the circle, the...