Child Abuse and Cults

I question often why I survived what I believe is something not meant to be survived.

My memories from the late 1960s, early 1970s still control much of my everyday existence in 2019.

My brain as a child split into so many parts that on any given day I don’t truly know who is speaking or thinking in our body. The experts call this poly-fragmented Dissociative Identity Disorder. I call it a chaotic hell.

So many fragments of me. All holding different feelings, stories, images, and talents. So many of them still children no matter how old the body becomes.

The fact that so many parts of me are children causes me to hold beliefs that only a child would hold.

I have spent years trying to convince my therapist she just doesn’t understand what it means to be raised in a religious community. She doesn’t get that a child must accept the religion they are born into, well, at least as children.

The right and wrongness of it never seems to really matter in my story. It is just not relevant. I think all forms of religion probably involve degrees of brainwashing that become your core beliefs and understanding of the world.

My birth community has robbed me of my life. Yes, I still exist, but feel lost everyday wondering why.

My brain is twisted in ways that are terrifying to me, and frankly, unspeakable to others. It is an easy secret to keep. No one outside my therapist would believe me, except others trying to survive similar histories. Perhaps those from my community would know of what I speak, though I imagine none of them would speak of it back to me. It is the silence that binds us.

Quietly on the outside, but chaotic and noisy on the inside, I try to navigate the choice I still face every day since I was a toddler.

The people in my community did great harm to my soul and mind. They went to elaborate lengths to make me believe I need to choose each day whether I will choose LIFE with those from the underworld, who require constant sex and scary, dark secrets to be kept; or choose a loving god, which will still require constant sex as an expression of love for this god, and ultimately require SACRIFICING MYSELF through blood-letting to show my true allegiance to this loving god.

This daily decision torments me. The “loving god” people seem so much nicer, even with their demonstrations of blood-letting and requirements of group sex. These are happier people. Drugs are plentiful whether desired or not so as to make the experience wonderful for everyone. They don’t hold the darkness of the underworld. Yet, they require me to end my life to show true allegiance. This is what true Christians do. These happier people come from The Way International.

As a child, I did not want to die. Though today, I am constantly drawn to the sacrifice of myself. It seems so freeing. The ultimate expression of love. And escape.

Instead, I am crippled by my selfish desire to live which requires my allegiance to the underworld, and all the brutality it entails.

My therapist says this is not a decision. She says you cannot make a choice when one choice is your death. This is all confusing to me when she speaks of this.

My rational adult mind knows this is not a choice for a child to make. This was an elaborate creation by deeply disturbed adults. Yet, the hundreds of children who live in my mind face this decision daily with only their child minds to understand it all.

Religion. Smoke and mirrors. Drugs. Mind control. Power. Survival. Satan. God. Jesus. Love. Hate. Violence. Sex. Pain. Freedom from it all. Controlled by it all.

So many people message me everyday that I should not take my life. I should stay. It is wrong to commit suicide. I don’t really want to do it they say. And the final nail, they say I don’t know what is waiting for me if I do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get messages regularly instructing me to kill myself. Yes, I am aware that makes me sound psychotic or schizophrenic. I don’t really care what you call it.

My mind, body, and soul has been subjected to horrendous trauma. In all that mess, my mind has been altered in ways that benefit those who perpetrated this abuse. It is easy to mind control a child, and if you are smart enough to know how to induce dissociative parts, you are golden for life as the mind will forever be controlled.

My mind can often get controlled by symbols or words. I won’t describe them here as I am not stupid enough to believe there are not still people who would use this to harm me.

Look at our epidemic of sex-trafficking. So many people think this is a new, outrageous problem. It is not. It is simply another version of my childhood.

There is always a market for the sick and perverted. Today’s technology, culture, transportation, and political views allow this to prosper without much difficulty.

The missing children who crossed the Mexican border. It is certainly not the first time our government engaged in assisting with sex-trafficking.

Yeah, I know, these are simply ramblings from a crazy person. None of its true. We live in a lovely world with lovely people who would never do what I have suggested. Just ask my mother, I am sure she will tell you this is all crazy and you should not believe one word.

It’s cool. I have listened to her my entire life. She is quite persuasive and powerful.

Namaste.

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The darkness of Halloween

It’s strange. Every year, I forget how much I hate Halloween until I start experiencing a cascade of shitty stuff until it finally hits me that it is Halloween month, and that never goes well for me.

Despite having inflatable Halloween blow ups in my front yard beginning October 1st (my spouse does this for our kids), I sort of dissociate that it is Halloween and that I don’t like Halloween and that it is usually a dark time for me. It takes me until about the week before Halloween to realize the darkness of Halloween is here.

Even with the constant reminder of Halloween staring me in the face, it takes imaginary messages from the devil penetrating me to understand the chaos and fear going on in my system this time of year.

I know many parts absolutely believe in these messages from the devil, but I want to say I do not, without being mean about their beliefs.

I don’t have the answer as to why parts of me feel with certainty the devil is sending messages to them through an inanimate object in my therapist’s office that looks like the face of the devil to them.

They are terrified. I just see a piece of metal that kind of looks like a scary face, but they see and feel the devil.

I try to focus on living a normal life, and fight to keep from being consumed with ideas that the devil is coming for us.

I hate the people who have scrambled my brain, body, and soul like this.

Instead of enjoying the candy and Halloween costumes of my kids, I focus on just getting through alive.

I don’t even know what all these scary feeling are about. I don’t know that I will ever know.

My brain still protects me from the madness of my childhood.

No matter how sane I try to create my life, madness will always be with me, as I am madness.

My silence about cults

I come out today as a cult survivor in the hopes of being one more person to speak truth to the unimaginable trauma caused by these cults. It is a very scary thing for me to do as I have been taught my whole life to keep this secret, or risk death.

I have always known I have cult experiences in my background, but I chose not to mention it to people because I did not want to get dismissed as “crazy” because I have seen how people react to this topic.

I have two cult experiences in my background, and in some ways they were related. Both of my cult experiences revolve around an extremely twisted Christianity.

I was raised in what I call The Community. If it had another name, I wasn’t aware of it. The Community involved sexual abuse, sex trafficking, money, drugs, mind control, pedophilia based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, sadism, ceremonies, and what is now an extremely powerful church in the world.

The Community is something I am still reluctant to talk about openly, even though many of its members are dead or elderly. They were, and quite possibly still, very powerful.

The Community morphed from nothing into an extremely powerful church, which scares me in that I would imagine the current church stewards would go to any lengths to protect it, and not allow its beginnings to be public. I don’t disclose the church name out of fear.

Growing up, I lived in a Middle Class neighborhood that only as an adult did I realize was out of the ordinary or peculiar.

My neighborhood was unusual in that all of our family friends (other Community members) were both tied to the beginning of a church, and the children were involved in all types of sexual behavior from a very young age.

They raised us to be extremely obedient, and to not discuss what went on in our community to those outside. In fact, we didn’t discuss it in Community either. We just did what we were told.

As a very young child, I was told by my mother to show up at different places in the Community. Sometimes this involved meeting men who were considered prominent members of the greater community, but they all had ties back to the church.

When I met these men at their places of work, homes, or in a specific meeting place that was designated for these pickups, I was expected to do whatever these men wanted without complaint or any type of resistance. It was through these experiences, I learned my value to my family and the Community was sexual.

Obedience was life or death, so I complied and died a little inside with each occurrence.

One especially sick member of our Community was involved in the mind control piece. He would lock us in a little room for hours and scream at us in the name of Jesus Christ, and no response from us was the right answer to get him to stop. He always finished by telling us because we had not accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts, we were going to Hell. Then he would sexually abuse us while talking in a whisper to Jesus.

My grandmother was a big player in this church. She gave a lot of her time and money to it. It was all she had since her husband was abusive to her.

My parents would periodically leave me at my grandmother’s house, and I always feared they wouldn’t come back for me.

My grandmother had very rigid religious beliefs. Her house was spotless, and there was no room for a normal child in that environment. She had very strict rituals about how meals were to be eaten, and no amount of crying would change the rules. When she bathed you, she scrubbed your skin in the most painful way to clean all dirt and sin from your body.

Still, my grandmother’s house was less abusive than what I experienced at home.

From time-to-time, a well known cult called The Way International (you can Google them or find them on Facebook) would come to town and my grandmother would give me to them. I would ride in the back of a station wagon with other kids I did not know to the bonfire in the woods where other Way members were gathered.

These Way members were all fairly young, mostly in their early 20s. At these gatherings, the Way members would drug us, and teach us about our destinies as children who were chosen to sacrifice themselves in the way Jesus did. They also would talk of bloodletting as a practice to show our allegiance to God. After our religious teachings, the Way members would take turns having sex with us.

Some would say this is fantasy, and that’s ok. I don’t need anyone to believe me at this point in my life. I live with the scars, and have no interest except to try to heal from this.

Part of my point of this writing is to express that the work of the Devil can also be done through those who believe they are practicing Christianity.

In my cult experiences, the only time Satan was brought into the picture was to teach me if I did not embrace these Christian teachings, then Satan would be waiting for me.

When your foundation in life comes from this type of disturbing beginning, you don’t escape unscathed. Your mind is damaged almost beyond repair, and for me, this beginning was partially responsible for my development of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

This is not simply religious extremism. This is a perfect example of how children are subjected to organized abuse.

As much as I would like to believe these people and groups don’t exist, they do. My memories are clear, and always have been.

Unfortunately, every single child I know from this Community suffers from mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Many of us may have physically escaped a cult, but find we can never seem to outrun the cult indoctrination completely. It lingers in our minds and comes out at certain times of the year and through certain triggers we may not even understand.

The mind control programming that goes with cults is extremely challenging to overcome, and with so many people skeptical of the cult concept to begin with, there are very few people in the world who even know how to help people who have received this type of programming.

I would like to say I am in a place where the programming and fear from the cults no longer affects me. Unfortunately, I still have parts of me who believe in these teachings, and when I try to talk with my therapist about these experiences, sometimes my brain takes off like a rocket into paranoia and dangerous false beliefs.

The darkness from within

Today I went to therapy and had parts that have relationships with cults and religion out in session.

I am not happy about it because I do not like people to see this side of me, not even my therapist. It just seems like it is better left unsaid and unexperienced by the outside world.

My strongest cult part came out when they weren’t satisfied by the way the part before them was handling the discussion with my therapist. This part is quite intelligent, definitely more so than me. It has access to knowledge of religion and cults that I don’t keep in my accessible part of our brain. They can be scary and mean, too.

The time before when this part came out we were at a residential treatment facility in California. The therapist there really wanted to speak to this part, and I was surprised it came out.

He debated religion and discussed his feelings about the value of modern day human sacrifice as similar to what Jesus did. He believes in bloodletting and human sacrifice and claims this is necessary so other people can continue to live on this planet.

By the time he finished speaking to our California therapist, she was visibly rattled, and ended up calling the emergency crisis team to evaluate me. Though we didn’t get admitted to a hospital because we know that game, we were discharged from that program a couple of days later for reasons that are unclear to us.

Today, our regular therapist got her first glimpse of him, and I don’t think she likes him or us any more. She would deny this because that is the type of person she is.

But, let’s face it, no one wants to go down this rabbit hole with us. It is scary and dark and no good can come from it.

Evil scares people, and they fear this is what evil looks like up close.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Understanding Dissociative Identity Disorder

I have Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which most people don’t seem to understand and are terrified of it. I guess I understand the not understanding part, as it is often hard for those of us who have it to understand ourselves sometimes.

I want to tell you about my experience to see if I can help bring any clarity to the understanding and fear of this disorder.

I grew up in an alcoholic and extremely abusive home. Sexual abuse, violence, religious abuse, and neglect were part of my everyday childhood. I am not going into detail here about the child abuse I endured because that is a whole other very big topic. I just need you to accept I endured a horrific childhood that wouldn’t be imaginable to most people, so I can stay focused on trying to explain the DID.

Growing up, I didn’t have a manual to read to tell me how to deal with the amount of trauma I experienced, but I was lucky enough to have a resilient brain to help me survive it.

As a child, I was often in overwhelming abusive situations that my brain just couldn’t process at that developmental point in my life. So, my brain ended up splitting off into what I call different “parts” or personalities to handle all the trauma and other things in life that I was expected to handle.

For instance, I had parts that would handle being sexually abused through the night, and other parts whose job it was to go to school the next day and pretend like everything was normal. I have parts that hold specific traumatic memories, and other parts who hold the feelings that go with those memories. I have parts who function just fine in the world, but will tell you they can do so because they did not experience the trauma themselves. For them, it is like it did not happen to them.

I have parts who have their own friends, and socialize very differently. The outside world that might notice this chock it up to mood swings, which I find very funny.

My parts are evolved enough to know they all share the same body, but my parts also each see themselves as a separate person living in this body. Most of them see themselves as much younger than the biological age of the body, which often creates a lot of confusion for all of us as the body is aging.

My parts are very different, some even have different names, ages, genders, sexual orientations, religions, vegetarians, meat eaters, happy, depressed, cognitively impaired, brilliant, social, agoraphobic, and on and on.

Most people don’t know how to look at me and understand that depending on which part is out, the essence of who I am shifts to that different person.

One moment I can be experiencing the world through the lens of a successful and bright 40 year old woman, and something may trigger me to shift to an 8 year old boy who is afraid of everything and has trouble navigating the world and trusting anyone.

A lot of people don’t believe it is possible for someone to truly be this way, but the truth is the brain is an amazing thing, and there are thousands and thousands of us on Facebook alone who all seem to have a similar way of living in the world like this as adults, yet we have never met each other in person to come up with some collaborative scheme to fake this for reasons that would only benefit those accused of child abuse.

My life is very challenging on a daily basis. Amnesia and psychiatric symptoms like anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, and PTSD are my biggest struggles. These symptoms are fairly common for those of us navigating DID.

I have had this diagnosis for 28 years and it has been confirmed by multiple experts (this fact seems to be important to people, so I put it in). In the 28 years of knowing about this diagnosis of DID, I have worked really hard to have some semblance of a life and to get better.

I have given up on getting better at times, and have just tried to learn how to navigate my life without letting others find out I have DID. This is definitely a disorder of secrecy, as my experience has shown that when people find out you have it, they immediately pivot away from you as if you suddenly became dangerous and scary, no matter how long you have known them and in all sorts of capacities.

Hollywood has not helped with people thinking this is a scary, dangerous disorder because it has really only made movies about DID (formerly MPD) that portray killers and other dramatically scary people.

The truth is that:

1. People with DID are typically some of the kindest people you will meet. They are kind because they have been hurt so much that they would never want to hurt anyone. They are often overly sensitive to not wanting to hurt people in any capacity.

2. I realize people do not want to believe DID exists because then they would have to believe that horrendous abuse is happening to children all over the globe. Because NO ONE gets DID unless they have experienced horrendous trauma as a child, usually before age 8. And the truth is, this is happening way more than anyone wants to fathom.

The biggest truth that people should understand is that we are already living among you as your neighbors, school teachers, therapists, police officers, friends, and so on, and you have no idea we are here because our experience is that we must keep this particular victim status a secret to protect ourselves from further abuse as adults.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean when I refer to further abuse as an adult. The very system in place to supposedly help those of us suffering from mental illness typically refuses to help those of us with DID, and oftentimes doesn’t believe us.

The mental health system is sorely lacking in people who are qualified to help someone who has DID, and both therapists and treatment centers typically won’t work with us because of their own lack of education and fear of DID.

Therapists and treatment centers like Sierra Tucson and The Meadows that specialize is treating “trauma survivors” won’t treat trauma survivors who have DID (they both refused to treat me based on my DID diagnosis).

In my opinion, you have NO RIGHT to call yourself a trauma specialist if you decide the most traumatized amongst us don’t deserve your treatment because you are afraid of your liability, or some other equally ridiculous fear. We are people who deserve help, and it is the responsibility of the helpers to get the education they need to help ALL traumatized people, not just the ones who fit neatly on their trauma spectrum.

When we feel suicidal or in need of emergency help, we can’t just go to any hospital, because most of them refuse to acknowledge or treat those of us with this disorder. Instead they stick a variety of other diagnoses on us and medicate us into wellness (there is no medication for DID), so most of us with DID try very hard not to use the mental health system unless it is one of the rare people or places that understands and treats DID.

The most depressing fact is that DID is actually a serious mental health problem that can be “cured” if the person with DID wants that, and has access to appropriate resources, which they almost never do.

This makes me sad, and I hope it does you, too. Everyday when I am not focused on my own recovery, I think about how I can change a system to get people who have been so severely abused in this world the help they deserve.

No one deserves what happened to them to get DID. As fellow humans, we should all be trying to figure out ways to help our brothers and sisters who were served these horrific starts to their lives. I hope you agree.

Mind Control and Me

I don't know exactly how this happened to me, but somehow I have a program, like a computer program that runs in my brain. It makes it so I don't always have free will, and I am terrified of this program.

I realize this is what psychotic people say, but I will say it nonetheless, and if you need to believe I am psychotic, it is certainly your prerogative.

Every day for as long as I can remember, I fear people who might do something to alter my brain. This comes out in situations where someone wants me to put on headphones, has medical instruments on their desk, does guided meditation, says certain statements, or wants me to do therapies like neurofeedback, brain spotting, or EMDR.

It is terribly distressing for me, and no matter how much I try to convince myself that there is nothing to fear, I get filled with overwhelming fear.

I don't know exactly how, but I know my brain was programmed when I was a child. I suppose everyone's is to a certain extent. For me, though, I think mine is a little more like the Manchurian Candidate if you have seen that movie.

My brain works kind of like this: it can be free-flowing along like a normal brain and then someone says or does X. My brain stops the free-flow and a program becomes activated in my brain. These programs are never any good, especially for me. My brain's program is activated as if it something that I must do, and it was not my idea, nor do I have free will to decide to do it or not.

Today, I was working with a therapist, and she was talking about guided imagery as a skill to relax or be mindful. I don't understand much about the programming in my head, but I do know guided imagery is the quickest way someone can access my programs, and so I avoid it at all costs.

Unfortunately, with the therapist from earlier today, we had different ideas of guided imagery, and so she started into something that in my mind was guided imagery, which puts me into an instant trance or hypnotic state, and my brain went crazy from there.

I am fairly sure she was rambling about some safe bubble around me, but my brain deciphered that into meaning I was supposed to cut my wrists. And down the spiral with that command did I go.

And though I have not carried out that command from my program, not doing so has made me incredibly mentally sick.

I am preoccupied with cutting my wrists and imagine what that would look like here. My brain is filled with psychotic feeling thoughts, and I imagine myself as a very young child sucking my thumb as bad stuff is happening around me or to me.

People want me to be optimistic about stopping the programs that are in my head, but the truth is most people don't understand what I am talking about, and there are only a handful of people in the world who help unprogram a programmed person.

So my optimism is low. And the world is a terrifying place at the moment.

Sigh.

The mistaken survival of the soul-less child

 

I have walked through my entire life a fraud. A nonexistent soul using the mortal body of no one. I am a fraud because from time-to-time, I would use this body to pretend as if I was a normal human being. Though, I always return to my place of nothingness. The place where those without souls return.

As a child I tried my best to be as invisible as possible. I tried being very still and quiet. I do not want to be noticed because I know I do not belong to this world. This world is confusing and cruel and scary. I don’t like it, so I am happy to not really belong to it. Yet, somehow, I got stuck with this mortal body that always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is no making sense of the life this mortal body was given. The people who come in and out of it. The constant desire for it to die.

To be human is to claw your way through everything to survive. This soul-less being does not wish to survive this cruel human world.

This body does not know love, comfort, happiness, safety, or anything that would be good or pleasurable. This body knows darkness, sadness, hatred, pain, evil, death, anger, and a strong desire to turn out the lights on this mortal body.

Without hope, there is death.

This soul-less body was created from birth with lies, pain, shame, fear, and brutality. It was programed to be obedient, to never disobey, and to serve the greater human species to which it did not belong.

How can an entire species be so cruel, even to the soul-less body who was never one of them? But it is true, and that is the way it is.

A wrecked soul-less child body who mistakenly survived. It was never supposed to survive. There is not upside for this being. There is no better. No nothing. Especially a real life on the human planet.

It is so confusing to figure out what to do with this fraud of a soul-less body. Oh children, why did you survive? I suppose some instinct, or maybe they made you with their confusing lies. I don’t blame you. I promise I hold no anger toward you. You were only babies and toddlers and youngsters doing what you thought you were supposed to do.

Now we have this fraudulent body built through evil lies, and there is nothing for it to do but to lay in bed until it dies. Oh wise one, you are correct in that we could take it from this earth sooner by our own hands. But, they say it will ruin the human children in this new family.

I know we don’t belong. But there is a speck of dust, maybe love, in this soul-less body that makes me think how sad it would be for these human children to be ruined by our actions.

We may know we never belonged, and wouldn’t have ever wanted to belong to this world, but now we have somehow become connected to these two children who look to us to keep behaving in a fraudulent way because they need us to.

Why, with no soul inside, do we have to always be the good guys? Why?

Because that’s the way it is.

 

Why was I born?

I never mattered. My family ensured I understand this. I figured this out early. My brain became dizzy and lost and alone. Early on I didn’t know suicide was an option. I thought I had to stay on this very horrific planet where life didn’t make any sense to me.

I was the 3rd child in my family, the first two being older brothers. My parents tell the story that they wanted a girl, which is why they had a 3rd child, and I naively thought for years they wanted a girl for the “normal” reasons families typically want a certain gender. I was wrong.

What I could never understand is why if my mom wanted a girl, then why did she hate me so much? And why did everyone in my life treat me so poorly, and it seemed to be ok, and my role in the family.

From as far back as I can remember, my mom was always upset with who I was and how I looked. She would yell at me in her bathroom making me look in the mirror and tell me all the things wrong with me. One thing that especially infuriated her was that I didn’t hold in my stomach all the time like a proper young lady. Otherwise, I was showing the world I was fat. The fact that I was malnourished and skin and bones didn’t enter into this repeated criticism.

I was born into this family, never to understand it. I never understood why my older brothers who were constantly in trouble were treated special and as if they were loved, but I hardly existed as a wanted child in my family. Well, at least not the right kind of wants.

I don’t ever remember being loved or cared for by this family as a child. No one cared where I was, what was happening to me, or whether I had appropriate food or medical care. I was always more of a burden expected to keep my mouth shut under every circumstance. No one wanted to hear or cared what I had to say.

Love in any kind of normal way did not exist for me. As close as I have to love in some kind of caring way was once in a while my middle brother would pull off my older brother for things he was doing to me.

I didn’t have any caring neighbors, relatives, people at school, or anywhere else. It was as if I was a ghost, and didn’t matter to anyone.

No matter how many times my therapist explains it to me, I can’t seem to comprehend that my parents would intentionally have a baby to harm it for their sick, personal gain. I know we all see stories of this kind of stuff on the news from time-to-time, but this can’t be my story, despite all the evidence that says it is.

I guess it seems incomprehensible to me partially because I am a mother of two, and I just can’t imagine harming them in any way. I would step in front of a train for either of my children, whereas my family of origin was the train coming right for me all the time.

I suppose I have to explain I was born to two active alcoholic parents , and my two brothers became alcoholics/drug addicts at a rather early age, and later drug dealers. This alone brought in lots of violence to our home, but it also brought in lots of other strange and sick people, amongst other things.

When I tell people this story, which I actually never do outside my therapist’s office, people assume I grew up in poverty. I guess to be correct, my family lived in an upper middle class neighborhood, but I did live in poverty in my own little world.

My mom was President of the Junior Women’s Club and pack leader for my brothers’ Cub Scout pack. She entertained lots of hot shot business men at fancy parties and over cocktails at our house. From time-to-time, she would be in the newspaper for her fancy parties and philanthropy work.

My brothers were in the newspaper twice as children, once for taking an overdose of my aunt’s “diet pills,” and the second time because they intentionally lit our house on fire in the middle of the night. The fire story leaves out that they left the family for dead, and many fire fighters endangered their lives looking for them in the fire. The story also leaves out that my drunk, passed-out parents were more annoyed with me than anything for waking them to tell them the house was on fire.

My father was missing a lot from the house. He just wasn’t there. I believe this was part of the dark life he was living. When he was home, he was drunk and my parents fought a lot after their drinking buddies left.

My mom grew up during the depression, and has several siblings who I would describe as all mentally unstable in a religious kind of way (like psychotic). All of my cousins on my mom’s side were drug addicts and some were mentally ill in scary ways, all except two, and those two cousins were adopted, but still describe their childhood as something they had to escape from.

My mom was by far a very attractive woman, and she used this to her advantage her entire life, and wasn’t afraid to tell you so. To this day she looks about 20 years younger than she is. She also says she was sexually abused as a child.

She is a classic narcissist. Everything is about her. No matter what is happening, she manages to turn the story back around to her. She requires constant attention, and has no respect for anyone’s wishes but her own. Just tonight my mom called and I told her I had neck surgery this week, and there were some complications with the anesthesia. Without a beat, her reply was to tell me she has red dots on her leg and wants me to come up with some type of solution for her problem, and my issues never exist unless she is blaming me for a problem.

But here’s the key, to everyone on the outside we were this upstanding family mostly respected in the community. No one would ever guess what went on behind closed doors unless they were participating in it.

My mom has been called a sadist, too. I grew up in a fairly large beach town, so there were always a lot of transient or seedy people around. I wandered among them and received my share of abuse from them. But my mom liked to do a special thing to me. When I was about 5-6 years old, she would drive me about 5-10 miles from my home and leave me there. At that age, I didn’t have the wherewithal to know what to do, so I would just sit and wait for many, many hours. Usually by nightfall my father would find me and bring me home. We never spoke of this, but I was always terrified to be left somewhere. My sick mother thought this little joke was funny. I don’t know what my father thought, but I know at the end of the day he always picked her over me.

My life growing up from a very young age was nonstop physically, sexually, and religiously abusive, neglectful, and psychologically torturing. As a result, my mind decided to survive by creating Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which was formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder. I developed “parts” or other inside people to break up my life and handle things I couldn’t. I didn’t do this consciously, it just happened. It is what allowed me to survive.

As an adult now, my mind is filled with “parts” or other people. Some have more expansive identities than others. Though it helped me survive my childhood, it is by no means an easy life, and many days I have thoughts of suicide. My memory is severely impaired due to the DID. It is something I try to hide everyday. I have to negotiate between the parts of me who will be “out” on any given day or moment. As a result, this body has no clear sense of who it is. Not having a cohesive sense of yourself is a depressing predicament to be in for your entire life.

Loneliness is the prevailing feeling when things are good. Because if you don’t have this disorder, it is not something the rest of the minions on this planet understand, or even believe in.

Being Bad

Today I went to see a guest therapist as my therapist is recovering from surgery. I trust the guest therapist–a combination of my instinct and the fact that she works a lot in the church. I can tell by her actions and words she is a good person. Not perfect, but one I can trust. It is ironic that her interwoven religious work with her therapist background makes me trust her when I have so little experience on trusting church or religious people. My history should tell me to fear them, but I trust my instinct more. Hopefully it won’t backfire on me.

I was nervous and confused about why I decided to go there. Maybe because we had unfinished business, or maybe I thought I could trust her to give me some support and insight on some issues floating around in my head. Either way, I am glad I went as she was very nice even though I was so scattered.

I tried to stay on one topic, but the voices in my head tried to distract me whenever she said something that could be meaningful to my system. For me, when I am trying to talk with someone on the outside and start hearing voices in my head at the same time,  it is very hard to follow what either of them are saying. I just try to get the jist of what each is saying. Today was especially frustrating because both the voice outside and the voices inside were unlocking a year long mystery problem and I couldn’t catch it all in my brain.

My mystery problem for the past year plus is that I can’t get out of bed to do anything except go to appointments, and only then can do it if the day isn’t too overwhelming.

I went from being totally normal looking—social and very successful at work and other areas of my life, to not wanting to leave my bed. It is not that I sleep all the time, I just have a feeling of safety when I am here. I really can’t explain it, and I call it a mystery because I have been desperately trying to solve and correct this problem for over a year now. I haven’t had much luck. Mostly theories, with no real solutions.

Today, the guest therapist asked me some questions about it and approached the subject just slightly differently than others in the past had, and low and behold I heard new voices talking about “the why” inside my head.

From what I could take and didn’t lose in trying to follow two conversations at once is that the parts inside said I did not deserve to be successful and working, and that I was “bad.”

I am very familiar with the I am bad belief. When you go through what I have been through, there is just no other logical explanation other than I must be so bad that I deserved all of it to happen to me. Especially if you believe in God, how else do you rationalize it. What kind of God would allow this to happen to a child?

I know some good adult explanations on why this happened that are probably the truth, but the way my mind works is that I share it with other parts who are literally stuck in time, so their minds may work like 4 or 5 or 8 year olds in trying to understand life.

In my recovery process, I have what I call other parts bleeding into my space and thinking. On this issue, this happens, so even know I accept and understand as an adult the truth of my life, my younger parts influence my thinking and I walk away with the conclusion and feeling that I am bad, and always will be know matter how hard I try to be good.

So, to relate it back to today, my core belief is that I am bad. A little over a year ago something really bad (at least in my world) happened to me that was earth shattering and heart breaking to me. The only explanation is that this happened because I am bad.

I don’t want to keep getting hurt, so I have learned that if I stay home in bed, it is less likely that will happen. Because remember, no matter how hard I try to be good, I always end up getting hurt, which means I am being bad again.

I think I am a good person, but the universe or God or whatever keeps sending me a different message. Yet, I keep trying to be good enough to not get hurt….