Surviving the day with my mom

I stood next to my mom in the cashier line at the run down Macys. She is 87, battling dementia, and growing weaker. There is only one cashier and she is moving slowly, so the line doesn’t really move. I tell my mom to move back a little from the people in front of us as Covid is raging through the community again. My mom doesn’t have the wherewithal to navigate social distancing and masking without me.

A little girl, probably 4 years old, is twirling around with her mother in front of us. My mom is watching her closely and can’t take her attention off her. My mom says to me “she’s going to be a dancer” and when I don’t acknowledge her familiar comment, she says to the little girl “you’re going to be a dancer” and the little girl looks uncomfortable and then away as my mom can’t take her gaze off her.

I suddenly feel shame pouring into my body as my mom attempts to give this unwanted attention to the little girl. I know I can’t stop her, so I begin to dissociate just a little to try to pass this moment. But the line seems to be taking an eternity.

Time passes as I ease back into the present and find that the line has moved just a little. The little girl is doing her best to entertain herself while her mom waits to buy her the outfits she picked out for her.

I honestly am not looking very closely at the little girl other than to admire the cool shoes she was wearing. In a slightly dissociated state, I find myself only minimally present in the line with my mom. I am doing my very best to tough out bringing my mom and her boyfriend to the mall to get her a Bra and him a belt.

I have been trying to set boundaries around being with my mom. She was recently verbally abusive toward me, which had stirred up a lot of parts within me. I was doing a good job seeing her less at her assisted living home. But, she had called one of my little parts the day before.

Calling a little part is not something I am used to her doing. This is a new thing she is doing to “motivate” me to do whatever it is she wants. She had called on a part that she used to sexually abuse when she would have one of her episodes of drunkenness and despair when my father would disappear on her.

My sweet little part knows that it is the present, but they are still stuck in thinking like an abused child who has to take care of their mom, no matter what.

My therapist did her best at trying to help the little one with the way they were thinking, but these beliefs are strong and certainly not going to be undone in a 50 minute therapy session. The little one was in a significant amount of distress over these boundaries and us not doing more of what my mom wants from us.

I gave in and pulled together my protector parts who know how to be around my mom without any emotion. I stood there without emotion as my mom is talking to me without me really being present. Then, I heard it. I heard the sick words that weren’t quite right for my only halfway present brain to keep pretending like everything was normal.

“Look, she is already acting like a woman.”

My brain swerved to come present. Sounding angry, I said “what are you talking about??” At the same time I knew exactly what she was trying to tell me. She says with a smiling gaze, “you didn’t see it, but she is doing things to let us know she is ready to be a woman.” I glance at the little girl and she is only sitting there playing like a 4 year old.

Shame fills my body. The lights seem to go out for me briefly as I next found myself shopping for pillows while she was still in line. I see that she is finally about to reach the cashier and I come over because my mom has trouble remembering how to do things, so I help her pay for her bra.

I look to the exit at the Macys and wonder if we can make it that many steps without something else happening. I just need to pull it together and pretend like we are a normal family. No one can tell the perverse sickness accompanying me. I try to push the shame far away as I know I need to get us out of there and get her back away from me.

To someone else, her comments may have seemed benign, but I knew better. I grew up with this woman sex trafficking and abusing me and others, so I knew these were the words of a perpetrator who forgot her moment in time and was experiencing pleasure imagining taking the little girl’s innocence from her.

It is so weird because in my mind I think I can’t go back to the past and understand the how and the why of my abuse. And then this woman with dementia shows back up in my life. And with this dementia comes parts of her who are from our past. They are ugly and familiar. They are twisting up my dissociative system something good.

I want to believe that because I survived this day and didn’t go off the rails that some good will come out of this. Maybe I am in fantasy, but I try to be hopeful. I mean, I have been so afraid of this woman my entire life, and now I can stand next to her and realize she is sick and twisted and can’t hurt me unless I let her. I am the adult. I have more power than her. I just need for all my parts to believe this new reality.

I didn’t see this coming, but my part “Wisdom” did. They told my therapist last week that maybe the ordeal I am going through with taking care of my abusive mom may be a blessing. Maybe so, but I am left feeling like I need to die a thousand deaths after today.

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Drifting

Drifting toward health.

Drifting toward death.

It doesn’t seem like this should be so confusing, but it is.

Some days ago, a little girl, maybe 4 or 5, stood in my childhood bedroom watching in freeze mind as my mother threw out her toys into the big green dumpster my mother had wheeled into the room.

This child did not understand, as any reasonable person wouldn’t, why her mother insisted on stripping every bit of humanity out of her.

She caused no trouble in the house. She did everything her mother or brothers told her to do. She had sex with whoever wanted it. She tried not to breathe as she was afraid it would upset them. Her existence was so minimal.

Still, with trying to do everything right, her mother hated her with such sadistic pleasure.

Her mother had made sure to strip her of everything.

Decency. Humanity. Love. Free thought. All gone.

She was forced to live in a room that only had a bed and a piece of office furniture. There could be no signs of a human child living there. Only nothingness, so she would always know she was nothing and nobody.

The little girl is stuck in this place, long past trying to understand her life.

Confusion, obedience, and an ounce of pain belonged to her.

I watched her for days. She was stuck there. I was stuck watching her. I had no explanation to give her. Yes, it was all vaguely familiar to me, but I wanted to keep it “not me” because that looks like such a painful, awful existence. Who would want that?

Feelings of suicide had been circling us as a system. I was not in as much control as I usually am, partly because watching this little girl made me want to die.

So I let the others inside me deprive the body of oxygen until I reached an altered state of consciousness. Here, I could go to the little girl in the bedroom.

Like I would do with my own wounded outside children, I reached down and picked her up and held her. She had never been held before, but she did not resist me and gave in to trusting me and let me carry her away.

I held her tightly against me, with her legs wrapped around me, and I could feel her pain and confusion. It is stuck in my heart.

I wanted to promise her that she would never be hurt again, but I knew I couldn’t do that in this very imperfect world.

She had endured more pain and suffering than a nation of people.

She would experience it no more.

I delivered her to the angels in heaven as I knew of no other place that promises the end of suffering. I told her she would be safe there, and the angels would love her and take care of her.

After I delivered her, I gasped for breath to get some oxygen in my earthly body. I was barely there. I was barely making it out alive.

I struggle to care about the damage done to my brain, or my almost lost life. It seems unimportant in the scheme of things.

I look to my childhood bedroom everyday since then, and it is empty. She is gone. She is free from the cruelty dealt to her.

I am relieved to have set her free. And uncertain as to what this means for me.

Namaste

Father’s Day 2018

In years past, I celebrated this day with you. I chose to remember only the good I thought I knew about you.

This year it feels as if it is just another day. Another holiday that I don’t recognize.

If I let myself, I could get angry and hurt thinking about your role as my father.

As much good as you did for me, you failed me in so many more significant ways.

Your inability to love me, or choice to not love me, was the cruelest thing you could have done to me. What kind of father refuses to tell his daughter he loves her? As a parent myself, I can’t even begin to understand your actions and lack of love for me. No child deserves a parent who chooses not to love her.

Your decision to not protect me from all forms of child abuse cannot be understood or forgiven. No decent human being stands by an ignores his daughter’s pleas for help. I know you knew all about what was going on, and it hurts me so badly that you chose Mom and her sickness over me.

I deserved to have a father who loved me, protected me, and saw my self worth. You were not him, so this year I will not pretend to honor you on Father’s Day.

I pray that God has made you answer for the sins you perpetrated against me.

I deserved better. I know this, and you can’t take it from me.

Missing memories

I am missing the memories of most of my childhood before age 12. What I can remember is about 90% traumatic memories. I know I probably had more than 10% of my childhood being good memories, but I don’t have them.

When I think back on everything I can remember from my childhood, I was always feeling fearful, even in moments where it doesn’t seem like there should be fear for any reason.

I can remember 3 memories when I was in kindergarten.

The first is remembering that the best thing about kindergarten was that on “your day,” you got to go out in the hall and finger-paint. I know it was a highlight for me, but at the same time I feel intense fear thinking about the memory, and the scariness of the hall I was in.

The second memory was when one of my best friends came to school without underwear on while she was wearing a dress. I remember how mortified I was for her, and I was fearful because I knew it had something to do with the community we lived in together.

The third thing I can remember was being in the kindergarten teacher’s office area with her and another teacher doing a lice check on me. I gathered from their conversation it was not the first time they had me back there for a lice check. I remember them being sure I had lice and stumped when they couldn’t find any. I imagine the lice check was because I was dirty and unkempt. It was a very shaming experience, and again I felt fearful.

For the next 5 years at school, I can only remember 3 or 4 memories, and all of those are very scary and traumatic.

When I turned 12, my parents had quit drinking and moved our family away from the community we grew up in, and we literally became new people who had pretend normal backgrounds. There was never any mention or recognition of the past.

For whatever reason, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. In fact, I didn’t think anything of it until a therapist of mine some 38 years later pointed out how odd it was that my family had done that. I just shrugged it off because I never had the expectation that my childhood and family should make sense.

As a very grown adult, it is super frustrating to not have memories of my childhood and a lot of my adult life. Even though my adult life has not been terribly traumatic by my childhood standards, I still can’t remember things all the time.

The answer to this problem as I have come to believe is that because parts of me did not developmentally integrate when I was in childhood, I need to integrate us into one as an adult. Or, at the very least get parts of me who are stuck living in past trauma into the present.

To accomplish integration or removing active trauma from our head, we have to remember and process some of the memories. This is a difficult task for someone who can’t remember as much as I do.

I have been pushing my system for memories for a while now. I gamed my system and forced the process. As a result, I recently had some new memories come in rapid fire succession.

The memories I had before these new memories were horrific, so I wasn’t particularly worried as I honestly felt like things couldn’t be much worse. I was wrong.

There was a reason those memories were being kept from me. It has been almost a month since they first came up, and they have ruined me. I can’t seem to pull out of this constant suicidal crisis for longer than 10 minutes.

The new memories have shook me to the core. It has made it so I am not who I thought I was. A parent who I thought loved me and cared for me was not that at all.

It leaves me feeling like I was truly nothing to no one growing up. No one.

It is a hard pill to swallow.

I got what I wanted. I forced memories to come that probably should have never come.

I honestly don’t know if I will survive this suicidal crisis I am in. Everyday I just barely scrape by.

I am not sure I want to exist with this new sense of my identity. I wish I could just shake it off and go on with my ok adult life. But, I can’t let go of my past, and don’t know if I ever will. And if I never let go, living this haunted life until the end is an awful existence.

I don’t know if anyone understands what it feels like to have this haunting day-in-and-out.

It is like living in sheer terror everyday. Who the hell wants that?

Lacking anger, shame and depression prevail

Today, I feel no anger toward the many people who have abused me throughout life.

I know it gets complicated when it is your family, and sometimes we do weird shit to protect false ideas about our families.

But, I don’t even feel anger toward the strangers or people who mean nothing to me.

I have to think it is more about feeling anger than it is protecting the people. Maybe I am protecting myself from this anger?

It is weird to me because I have no trouble getting angry about things that happen in current day. I don’t like to hold onto anger because I think it creates toxicity in oneself to not let it go, but I do feel it is healthy to breathe anger into the situations or people that deserve our anger.

I think about my past, the people who hurt me, and I think I should feel anger toward those people who have ruined so much of my life. Internally, I feel and hear nothing. Crickets. Paralysis.

I have heard unexpressed anger turns into depression. I have tons of depression….

Living in a DID system can make the idea of trying to reach the anger feel impossible. It is kept far away from me for some reason.

Though I think I can handle the anger because my anger doesn’t scare me today, I have to believe there is some internal wisdom protecting me from this anger.

Or, maybe it is really just fear. Maybe I only think I am good with anger, and I am unknowingly terrified of the anger that must exist somewhere within me.

Maybe I don’t feel as though I deserve to be angry?

I am very in touch with my shame today, which means I feel as though I or we are bad.

After decades have gone by, I am still trying to control the abusive situations by believing they happened because I am inherently bad. I still struggle to fix this “bad” that exists within me.

When you grow up with extreme abuse and more perpetrators than you can name, it is hard not to believe it is your fault. You are the common denominator. Perpetrators even found me in adulthood, which is even harder to explain to myself.

I think of myself in terms of energy sometimes. I think of that child who attracted perpetrators. I think she must have had an energy about her that perpetrators could pick up on.

Is it wrong to be angry with yourself for putting out this energy into the world?

I think of my own daughter. I would definitely not blame her if perpetrators came into contact with her.

If she was sitting on a man’s lap and he got an erection, I would grab her off his lap and shove that man down to the ground. It would not be her fault, and I would be there to protect her.

So, why don’t I give myself the same treatment? Mostly because my parents did not value me enough to keep me safe from people and themselves.

The message they carved into my brain is that I don’t matter, and am only useful to them for their sick pleasures of torture and sex.

It’s challenging to build a healthy self after being raised with those messages.

It is incomprehensible to me how parents can treat a child the way I was treated.

I want to say it is because they were so sick, but I really still struggle every day with the idea that there is something so inherently wrong with me from the day that I was born that I deserved this.

I know I will never heal holding onto these beliefs, but how does one let go of what feels so much like their truth?

The obliteration of DID walls

I usually have a somewhat manageable life, though still difficult for sure. I typically manage with a lot of amnesia and a balancing of the competing ideas and feelings from the other souls who reside in my body.

There are souls in my body who feel hopeless, hurt, and angry, and usually deal with those feelings by wanting to commit suicide.

Usually I can help our system of souls through these tough times, but lately it has become increasingly more difficult.

Having had the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder for 30 years, I have reached a place where the system works pretty well together on most days.

We all seem to have co-consciousness as far as I can tell, and we don’t hate each other as far as I know. I explain it this way because new souls seem to appear often in therapy. In fact, I do not even try to keep track of them, and I don’t mean any disrespect to those souls, but my mind literally cannot remember it all.

As a system, there are some rules that we agree to live by. One of the most important ones is to not kill ourselves because of the damage it would do to our children (or my children, since not everyone claims them).

We also have the rule of not committing adultery since some of us are married. Some souls don’t like this, but they have agreed to it anyway in the spirit of cooperation and living a life with less chaos.

Another rule would be that younger souls, or noticeably different acting/sounding older souls, are not to interact with the outside children in our family as I believe this would cause great harm to my children.

These rules are usually followed fairly well by most everyone in the system. Sometimes a soul might be so upset that they choose to ignore the rule about no suicide or self-harm, but we have systems in place to stop those parts from acting on these feelings, or at least minimizing the expression of them. This is something we routinely have to deal with, and something we stay hyper vigilant about.

In our 20s, we had one soul in our system who decided to quietly kill ourselves. This soul was almost successful, so it is something we are always watching out for, and thankfully, haven’t had a serious attempt since then, though we have had less serious attempts.

My system has been slapped in the face with a lot of new revelations lately, namely, it is becoming crystal clear who our family was, and the awful things they have done to us.

In the past, we have always had these memories, but what is new is the ability to start putting it together in a narrative of our lives, which means a whole lot of grief is staring us down.

Our new narrative is honest, but incredibly painful to face this truth and stay planted on earth.

This new narrative has left souls scrambling to make sense of it all. To hold the truth in our hearts and not die is quite the challenge.

Our system has become quite destabilized. We find ourselves switching from one soul to the next without any control or order to it. Our memory and executive function has dropped to whatever the lowest score would be on that scale. We can barely complete a thought in conversation without switching to another soul and then back.

We have not honored the rule of not switching souls in front of my children. I have put every last piece of energy into trying to stay present for them, but have found myself “waking up” to another soul interacting with my children. This has never happened before.

I find it difficult to complete thoughts I am trying to express, and found myself borrowing the thoughts of other souls to try to complete an idea I was speaking about. This has not worked out very well as most of us are very different from one another, and many inside have some very destructive ways of thinking.

My internal world feels like it is being obliterated, which leaves a dissociative person like myself extremely confused and barely able to function. The neat and orderly walls of our system have been something manageable for the system. But suddenly those walls don’t seem to be there so much.

My therapist pointed out the possibility that the souls within my body may be “transitioning” to a place of more wholeness (or integration), which understandably has left me completely confused and overwhelmed to suddenly be experiencing their thoughts and feelings in no particular orderly process.

I’ll be honest, this last week I have had many moments where I haven’t been coherent in what I was trying to express. I have changed the way I have sounded 5 times in a ten minute period.

In this moment of rest, I would like to be happy about this possibility of integration (yes, we are in the camp who wants it), but we are also in a state of extreme suicidal ideation, planning, and acting out. I am trying my best to stay vigilant, but I also know I don’t have the skills or the strong desire for this vigilance because of the passive influence from the other souls.

I should be in a hospital given the level of chaos and difficulty in me stopping the serious suicidal feelings and plans. I just don’t have the energy or inclination to go to a hospital.

If I go into a hospital for safety, I travel out of state to one of the few places that understands DID. I can’t just go up the road to psych hospitals in my city because they will not believe in my DID, so will more than likely shoot me up with antipsychotics to “fix” me. Not willing to do that.

When I am more of a clear thinking person, I would not risk what I am risking. I keep hoping I will wake up to a better day because I know this won’t last forever. But, I also need to keep in mind the people with DID who successfully kill themselves.

This is an evolving situation. I am hoping things become more manageable again, but not at the expense of possible progress.

I will try to update you again as to where I land next. Stay tuned.

Facing the truth of our childhood

Where do you belong in the world when you were raised as nothing or no one that mattered by your family of origin?

I find that lots of people try to tell me that this history doesn’t matter—that I am still someone–no matter how horribly I was treated. I find these well intentioned people have one thing in common: they were all raised by at least one parent who thought they mattered and cared about their wellbeing.

I keep coming back to the metaphor of a house to explain my thoughts. In order for a house to be strong, sturdy, and even to stay standing, it must have a solid foundation. When it doesn’t, people can keep throwing money at the house to try to repair the faulty foundation or build around it, but they never end up with the strong home they long for unless they tear it completely down and rebuild it.

My start in life was bad. Both of my parents were alcoholics, and my mother was hitting her peak of alcoholism when she was pregnant with me and during my early years.

My parent’s alcoholism didn’t just affect them. It affected my entire family system.

For reasons I may never clearly understand, my parents were involved with some sick and on the fringe behavior and people.

I have two older brothers, but my parents wanted a girl, so they tried one last time. I had always thought they wanted a girl for the normal reasons one might want a girl after having two boys.

I was wrong. My mom hated me for as long as I can remember, and possibly from the moment I was born. I was never good enough for her, and she criticized me daily about who I was.

What has become clearer to me recently is that both of my parents treated me in ways that no child should be treated.

From a very early age, my value in my family was to meet the sexual, sadistic, and financial needs of the family.

My entire family sexually abused me on a regular basis. I tried to deny it as long as I could, but my dissociative barriers started really breaking down, and my childhood amnesia is starting to get filled in.

With the memories of my incestuous abuse from a very early age, I can no longer deny that my family not only didn’t love me, but they also didn’t even care for me enough to treat me like a human being.

I was intentionally hurt for their pleasure or financial gain. “Parts” formed in response to keep me alive through this horrific childhood. My spirit died, but my body stayed alive. This distinction is important because I am not sure one can recapture a dead spirit, at least I haven’t so far.

I live today with many, many parts who are like people sharing my body with me. Some people may think it is cool, but I do not. I envision many souls trapped in one body leaving all the souls to live an incomplete existence under the best of circumstances.

The many parts living within me are all smack in the middle of facing the truth of our childhood in many different ways. The truth has taken our breath away. Some sit paralyzed with this new information, others feel extremely despondent and broken with this realization. It isn’t easy for any of us in our system.

Forget the processing and grieving of what we have been through. How does one even pick up the pieces to carry on with knowledge that no one loved us, or cared one bit about our innocence as a child. We did not matter to anyone for a very long time.

It is hard to face the truth that we were merely a “thing” for people to do whatever they wanted with. Either they did not see us as a human being, or they had no humanity within them.

Facing the truth, and not believing the fantasy version of my life I created, is an extraordinarily painful state of being.

I alternate between these states: incredible sadness, suicidal feelings, anger, self-harm feelings, and feelings of being lost and numb.

I don’t know what the next step is for me. My therapist worries the memories and feelings are too overwhelming for me. The way I look at it is I have two choices: I can face the truth and hope I don’t die in the process, or I can stay dissociated and keep myself living in La-La Land.

Neither of them sound appealing, honestly. Since I have been living a dissociated life for my entire life, I suppose it makes sense to travel the newer road.

As I choose this new road, I worry about the questions I can’t answer right now. “If I am not who I thought I was, what does that mean for my identity today?” “If I accept the truth that I was treated like garbage by my family of origin, can I still exist knowing that my creators valued my life at zero?” “Is there something inherently wrong with me that my family decided to treat me as garbage who didn’t matter to anyone?”

I can’t find sufficient words to describe my feelings about this journey. I have never quite understood how this journey works, but somehow I have always had the feeling that someone else, someone wiser and more powerful, has control over the path this journey takes.

There is comfort in knowing I am not in control of the journey, perhaps because I would hope a higher power would show me more mercy than I give myself.

The black hole of nothingness

I know I am at a low spot and will likely pull out of it. It doesn’t seem like it is going to be as quick as usual.

Today I had a PT appointment for my struggling body, and I had set the rest of the day aside to work on school work for a new program I am doing.

I ended up doing ZERO school work, and mostly just stared out the window most of the day.

I argued with my internal selves about how we promised we weren’t going to live out the rest of our days in this dissociated state of being. Yet, the day went by into the dark hole of nothingness that is so familiar to us.

I think on some level we believe this is the fate we deserve, or maybe this is the only fate possible.

We try to stay connected to the people and things we have in our lives, but honestly, outside my children, I really don’t manage this very well.

I am always puzzled by people who describe themselves as lonely. I never feel lonely, and in fact I think I really prefer to be alone most of the time.

Sometimes when I am walking down a street in my small city, I catch myself or another insider fantasizing about living alone in one of the local apartments instead of the nice loving home I currently reside in.

I do love spending time with my children, and sometimes with other adults, but I often return to my familiar place of staying in my head and living in my own world without the complications of the rest of the world.

I know this week I was delivered a blow to my identity when my subconscious decided to let go of some new and disturbing memories. I am trying not to think about these new memories as it creates a crushing blow to my spiritual being.

Yet, my mind is wandering in and out of madness, hysteria, and depression. I can’t ignore it, but not sure what to do with this new information.

I suppose I am to integrate the memory into me as part of me and my life experience. That sucks, so that hasn’t been on my agenda.

I refuse to embrace it, so it sits there with me everyday waiting on me to see what I am going to do.

I have no answers. Life has become challenging for me again. I can’t let the memories and bad dreams take my life from me, yet I am paralyzed to do anything else.

I am so angry at my family for doing this to me. What shitty, sick people they are. Yet, when they need me to pretend like everything is normal, I am right there for them.

I have to sit with this and not act on the feelings and suggestions from my other parts. It is really hard not to self-harm or die this week.

I have somehow survived this long, it doesn’t make sense to give up now….

I am not who I think I am

Today, I began my day getting triggered by my 6 year old son. I keep getting startled by him while I am sleeping in the morning, which then causes me to release all my fight or flight hormones in my body, and then I feel stressed and crappy at the beginning of my day.

Fortunately, it only happens while I am sleeping.

After getting startled awake, I then went to my neurofeedback appointment, which is a good place to go when you are feeling that way because they can help me bring my body back down to calm.

After calming my body, I then did another neurofeedback protocol I have been working with the last few weeks called “deep states.” I like this deep states work because it feels like you are dreaming while you are awake, and it helps you get in touch with your unconscious mind.

It is not like I go and my mind just accesses all my unconscious memories, but it does help me get a smidge more each time I do it.

Today, I processed a lot of familiar memories while in this deep state, and then I started having new memories that were upsetting to say the least.

I want to not believe these new memories from today, but even after I left I had the weirdest experience of having more and more memories involving the same person. It is like my brain would not stop downloading information into my awareness until there was no more room and I was utterly exhausted.

For better or worse, I had therapy today after neurofeedback.

In therapy, I was overwhelmed and felt suicidal. I had this feeling of impending doom because with these new memories comes the idea that I am not who I think I am.

My therapist thinks it is nonsense (my summation of what she said) that I am not who I think I am, but I don’t agree.

My identity today is based on beliefs I have about my life. It turns out my beliefs are wrong.

I built the foundation of my identity on the belief that my father loved me. No one else in my family did, but I thought my father did. I was wrong.

I have gone from believing I came from a family where one person cared about me, to understanding that I really came from a family where I did not matter to anyone, and was only in this family for their sick needs.

It makes sense now. When my father was dying, and I was sitting there with him everyday, he looked at me with pity, not love. He told others he loved them, but not me.

My false picture and selective memory of my father helped me create who I am. Since that is now known to be false, I am nothing but the garbage they believed I was.

I know I can get through this and define myself, but at the moment it doesn’t seem possible. The building blocks that make up my life are not what I thought.

I know some people might think I am dense for not realizing my missing childhood memories are going to make me feel horrible. But, I already know of horrific things that have happened to me. My childhood is already unbelievably horrible.

How can it be worse? I guess I answered my own question.

Not able to name my perpetrators

I have been struggling a lot lately with the idea of naming my abusers, or even publicly claiming my abuse.

I realize I am still holding overwhelming shame and fear about the abuse I suffered. With every mention of child abuse on my Facebook page, I worry what my mother would do to me if she found out I was telling anyone. What would my oldest brother do to me who is a narcissistic, psychopath living a seemingly proper life?

I have more abusers than I could actually name if I wanted to. I did name one recently who was a very public figure, and now I am being asked to help others take him down in a very public way (he is actually dead, but still has prominence in the world). Not sure what I will do about this situation.

My abusers did a really good job in keeping me quiet. Even at my very adult age I still fear naming those I could name.

It is complicated for me. Every day it is a struggle to keep my fragile mind intact with regards to the severe trauma I endured during my childhood.

My brain was so fragile before age 11 that I truly cannot remember most of my childhood. I mostly remember snippets of abuse, but I can’t remember hardly any “normal” or good memories.

Most of my abuse happened before age 11, but still lots of abuse happened after age 11, too. Once you get branded with the invisible “V” on your forehead to let the predators out there know you are a victim, new predators can find you easily.

Because my child abuse was severe and happened when I was so young, my mind did not come together the way it should have through proper development. Instead, the trauma caused me to develop Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which can still wreak havoc on my life today.

My mind is a jumbled mess of brokenness.

My emotions, memories, capabilities, and needs are broken into separate parts of myself. Though I can appear very strong, there are many days when I am at my breaking point and no one outside of myself even knows it.

I know I must stay functioning and strong for my children. They need me and are more important to me than anything else in this world.

Sadly, I don’t even feel a need for justice toward my perpetrators by naming them.

I barely survived my childhood, and still struggle to survive in my adult self.

Just about every kind of abuse has been done to me, including mind control. And I am weak because of this.

So, forgive me if I am not in a place to name my perpetrators. I believe I would do it if I knew of someone in imminent harm by one of these people.

One day I will be stronger, but that day is not today.