“All children deserve to be seen and heard. But they need people who have eyes to really see them and ears to really listen to them, especially when they are hiding inside………” C.

DID – Dissociative Identity Disorder

What causes DID?
Official diagnosis
Symptoms
Different parts
Song lyrics

Dissociation

Dissociative Identity Disorder (what we used to call MPD) is one of a few dissociative disorders. Dissociation is a defense mechanism of the human mind to protect itself against overwhelming traumatic experiences.

When you experience such horrendous abuse, you cannot defend yourself against the overwhelming fear, pain and other emotions that are a result of the abuse and you are powerless and helpless. It is not possible to integrate these enormous negative experiences into your life and your personality. And there is no one to help you, so help has to come from inside.

Officially (according to the DSM IV) the essential feature of a dissociative disorder is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment. The traumatic experience cannot be integrated so it is stored in pieces. For example, images, sounds, smells and feelings can all be stored in your memory separately. The trauma is 'buried', so to speak, in the unconscious. So that way you don't have a conscious memory of what happened. The experience is being stored in pieces, in different parts of your memory, even fractured into very tiny pieces of memory. Survivors of abuse and trauma sometimes remember an image but they don't know the story, or they remember a sound or a smell but they cannot connect a particular memory to it.

Even though it seems the trauma is forgotten, it never really is. It is not known on a conscious level, but it is never really forgotten. There are the symptoms that show that you still know somewhere inside or in your body.....the nightmares, the fears, the panic, the flashbacks, the body memories, the extreme emotional responses to things that are normal for other people...

So in short dissociation is a way of the mind to mentally and emotionally escape overwhelming physical and emotional pain.

What causes DID?

Factors in developing DID are:

• High ability to dissociate
• Severe traumatisation from infancy or early childhood on, i.e. overwhelming traumatic experiences that are life threatening to the child, that the child cannot get away from and cannot defend itself against in any way. Examples being sexual abuse and obviously ritual abuse.
• Neglect. The child is all alone with no one to help him/her. No one to protect the child. It grows up in this situation filled with violence and abuse and there is no one that will give the child any comfort, protection or support. No one helps....
  

When you realize this, it becomes obvious that a child in a situation like this needs a defense mechanism like dissociation. Help has to come from within. A child could never deal with these traumatic experiences consciously. And furthermore the child cannot possibly understand what is happening to her/him. It is too confusing. The child has no foundation upon which to develop a personality. The trauma is being split off from consciousness, especially when a certain traumatic experience happens more than once or when the child suffers other trauma as well. Part of the child's consciousness is being split off and develops itself to an alter personality that the child is not aware of. All this happens spontaneously under the pressure of the severe abuse. So the child can go on with life, go to school, play etc. without the overwhelming memories of the trauma.

Essential to DID is that the first splitting happens before the child ever had the opportunity to develop its own identity. So in essence there never was just one personality. The child has suffered trauma and severe abuse from infancy on.

These children never get the chance to develop into a whole person with their own identity. They do not develop a sense of self. They cannot develop into the person they were intended to be. By the extreme trauma they suffer more and more parts spontaneously split off and become their own identities and personalities, within the one person, who is not aware of the abuse, because these memories are carried by the other parts. Often the person is not aware of the other parts either, because they are separated from each other by walls of amnesia. Some parts know about others and some don't.

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Official diagnosis

De official diagnostic criteria for DID are (according to the DSM-IV):

• The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self).
  
  
• At least two of these identities or personality states recurrently take control of the person's behavior.
  
  
• Inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.
  
  
• The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g. blackouts or chaotic behavior during Alcohol Intoxication) or a general medical condition (e.g. complex partial seizures).
  Note: In children, the symptoms are not attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.
  
  

Symptoms

People with DID have 'holes' in their memories. They have amnesia for large parts of their past and are often unable to remember anything at all about their past.

They lose time, i.e. they are not aware of what they did or where they went for certain periods of time. In the present things can happen that the person doesn't know anything about, or can't remember afterwards, because another part has taken over control of the body in that time. So they do know time has passed but they have no memory of what went on.
In this case the person is not aware of the other part. Some parts are aware of each other and some aren't. That differs from person to person. And from part to part. If a person is aware of a certain part and can be there at the same time, being aware of what that part is doing, but not always being able to control it, the person is co-conscious with that part. And so different parts can also be co-conscious with each other.

When there is a change from one part into the other, we call that 'switching'. People can switch due to triggers, i.e. parts of the trauma surface because of triggering things that happen in the here and now. The situation (unconsciously) reminds the person of the trauma, they sometimes cannot tell the difference between the past and the present anymore and the particular part needed in that situation comes out.
Parts surface when needed to protect the person or deal with the situation at hand, because they have a certain job within the system. Or they surface because the situation triggers them into the past, and it is their job to endure more trauma.

Every part can have their own history, their own identity, their own image of themselves, their own name, etc. They can be recognized by their name, their sex (boys and girls can exist within the same person), their age, their way of talking, their vocabulary, knowlegde about certain things, and certain emotions that are essential to that particular part. But to really recognize them, you have to get to know them. Different parts can have their own taste in every aspect of life, e.g. food, what to wear, how they look, and how to decorate their house. One part may really like a certain kind of food, while another part hates it!

Research has proven that there can also be physiological differences between different parts, e.g. different eye color, tolerance for pain, sensitivity for certain allergies and asthma, how well the senses function. Some parts need glasses while others don't. Some parts can be deaf, or blind. Some medical problems only apply to certain parts and not to others within the same person.

There is a vast difference between alters and what they can or cannot do. Some can talk and others can't. Some can't walk, some can't think, some can't feel.
Some parts can have seizures and what looks like epileptic fits.

Different parts surface in different circumstances and situations, depending on the function and job they have within the system, for example to protect.

Some parts are stronger than others, and take over control much easier than other parts do.

People with DID hear voices of their inner parts talking to each other.
Voices they hear can also be flashbacks from the abuse, from what perpetrators have said to them, or programming.

People with DID often cannot look in the mirror. They are scared to look in the mirror, because they do not recognize themselves. They do not have a sense of self and cannot understand that it is them they see in the mirror. Every part can have a different image of self, a clear picture in their mind of what they look like and so when they look in the mirror it does not fit with that image and they will say: 'That is not me.'
Furthermore, mirrors may also have been used during the abuse, for programming purposes and so mirrors can be very triggering in itself.

A child part looking at her body can get very scared, because she sees a body that is all grown up, while she is still a child. This can be very frightening and confusing and usually leads to more estrangement from the body. "Those legs are too big. They are not mine!"

It is possible that the DID is hidden from others, or even from self, over the years of not knowing anything about the abuse. It is possible that the person just lives life being in one part, until the memories start to surface. And, just like when it was overt when the child was being abused so severely, it becomes overt again when the trauma surfaces and the person is right in the middle of it again, due to the reliving of the trauma and the flashbacks and memories.

DID is often accompanied by the following symptoms:

- Post traumatic Stress Disorder (e.g. nightmares, startle responses, flashbacks)
- Fear, panic attacks and fobias
- Depression
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Problems surrounding sexuality
- Eating disorders
- Sleeping disorders
- Suïcidal behavior
- Self-mutilating behavior
- Agression
- All kinds of physical ailments, also due to the abuse and programming, and a lot of pain

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Different parts

There are different kinds of parts and I want to name a few here:

- Little babies, that often only cry, from cold, pain and hunger
- Children of both sexes, formed when needed during the abuse
- Helpers and protectors, who are aware of potential danger and are able to protect the person or bring comfort inside to those who are hurting
- Parts that hold the memories of the different kinds of trauma and abuse
- Parts that fulfill certain functions and jobs within the person, or outside in society
- Parts that know everything that has happened and also know what is going on within the person, with all the parts, but they don't feel anything
- Parts that have identified with the perpetrator(s) and have to bring more damage inside, having to hurt or punish the other parts, or having to hurt other people in the same way they were hurt
- Cult parts, i.e. parts that have specific jobs within the cult and were created by the cult for that reason.
- Programmed parts, parts that were programmed by the cult for specific purposes only and can be triggered by the cult with certain clues (words, pictures, signs, etc) and accessed to reprogram them

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Song lyrics

All the pieces of Mary

All the pieces of Mary go round,
like a wheel of misfortune inside her brain.
All the pieces of Mary go round,
’till she finds somebody who can take the pain.

All the pieces of Mary go round,
it starts with a stare and then she’s gone away.
All the pieces of Mary go round,
maybe she’ll be gone away for good some day.

What’s the matter, she’s so fragile’
she gets shattered, she goes crazy,
from the clatter in her head, poor Mary.

All the pieces of Mary go round,
like a wheel of misfortune inside her head.
All the pieces of Mary go round,
she can float and fly up above her bed.

All the pieces of Mary go round,
it’s a cast of characters for all occasions.
All the pieces of Mary go round,
like a carnival ride in her imagination.

Don’t remind her, she goes backwards,
if you find her clock is broken,
it’s much kinder just to wait for Mary.

Her amnesia is her only anesthesia,
she’s so glad her memory ‘s so bad, isn’t it Mary?

All the pieces of Mary go round,
she just can’t remember what she can’t forget.
All the pieces of Mary go round,
’til she burns right down like a cigarette.

All the pieces of Mary go round,
now she’s all grown up with no place to go.
All the pieces of Mary go round,
where they’ll stop no one can know.
(Julie miller. From her cd; Blue pony, hightone records.)

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