When I was first working on accepting multiple personality as being part of me, I did some journalling. I dropped off doing it, as I'm afraid I may eventually do here. But I wanted to share some of it here, as it was then. Here's the story of how I got this way. At least, as I understood it a couple of years ago:
My childhood was a storybook time. I had two loving parents, went to a good school, and had a few good friends. I had piano lessons and karate classes. We had enough money, and my needs were always met, whether financial or emotional. Most of my wants were met, as well. I was a very bright child, and for the most part, happy. Not the ideal setup for a multiple personality story, is it?
Then I became a teenager. My parents split up, I got married and pregnant - though not in that order - I dropped out of school, and I found myself in a world totally alien to me. It was populated with people who yelled and hurt each other, and education might include a high school degree - might not. There was no money, and what little there was might be spent on health care. Everyone was sick, physically or mentally. Six people and two dogs in a two-bedroom house. Never a conversation conducted on a level below 'yelling'. The odor of dog permeated everything. I was learning to be a mother in this mess. A seventeen-year-old new mother with almost no support system.
But I escaped - I ran away to my Mommy, who wiped my tears, then kicked my butt until I went back to school and joined the grown-up working world. The fighting continued, but now I could call the police to help me put an end to it. And I did - on a regular basis.
That's how it started. The fights when I was married quickly developed a pattern. Baseless accusations, usually based on some imagined jealousy. Followed by insults and demotivating comments. The volume gradually got louder and louder. Finally, I've had enough. Let him/them scream yell throw things… I left. Not physically, because I couldn't. So I just shut down - I would lay down or sit, or sometimes fall on the floor. And that would be that last action that I took on my own. I would be limp and unresponsive.
Oddly enough, that didn't always end the argument. It would continue around me without me about me. I knew nothing of it, but would eventually fall asleep. The kind of sleep that you don't wake up from until you're good and ready. Smelling salts, poking, talking, water, nothing would wake me. I tell you this from what I've learned since, because I don't remember it - I wasn't there, remember?
The sleep would shift into a dream - always the dream - never did I just wake up. Awful dreams. Those I remember. Wish I didn't. Men in white lab coats chasing me down institutional corridors. A baby crying, lost inside a warehouse-huge maze of doors and hallways. Strapped to a medical chair with techs taking my blood, sticking monitors to me, cold metal. Forced into a metal tub of cold water. I never had shock therapy, not in waking. Flashbacks to over a hundred fifty years ago? Never ending the dreams until I'm screaming, crying, begging to wake up and go back to the life that's less of a nightmare than that.
I'm told sometimes I wasn't totally unresponsive. I've recovered a memory of sitting on the front porch, in pajamas, cold of winter, rocking back and forth and singing to myself. The song sounds like something of an Indian tribe, nothing I've heard before, chanting. Rocking. Not shivering in the cold. And once, the baby cried, hungry. I got up, went to her, nursed her. He tried to take her from me, afraid I would hurt her. I remember an anguished look filled with all my hate glaring at him, can't take my child from me, only I can feed her, only I can protect her, fill her with my love that he turned away in violence.
One time I awoke sitting in a wheelchair. It had been wheeled into a small concrete room ten feet square, and I faced away from the door. Empty room. Empty but for me. Cold, no one there. By the end of the day, I was admitted to the pysch ward. Wonderful pleasant week in the hospital, making moccasins for the baby to wear, drawing, eating fruit, group therapy talk time. Plenty of rest and no yelling. These doctors weren't scary. The last thing I remember them saying is, "We aren't allowed to advise you to leave your husband." They were right. The advice didn't help - I knew what had to happen already. I just wasn't ready to do it.
Knowing what I know now, I realize that was the time of splintering. Silent One was born then, out of a need to escape this alien world of loud words and violence. Oddly, I think the yelling was more traumatic for me than the violence - it was just so foreign to the way I had learned to treat people you care about.
Most multiples splinter when they are children, through years of severe sexual and emotional abuse and trauma. My clock's off; I splintered as a teenager, when my entire world went topsy-turvy. I think that's why my dissociation isn't so bad as others I've read/talked to. I'm co-conscious more often than not, and we tend to work together well. I've joked that I have DID-light.
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