I have dissociative, fighting, strong parts, the goal of which is to say what I experienced.
Since I left the cult, they have sought to understand the laws of society, understand how things work and achieve justice, each with different visions and goals.
Some have remained stuck in a binary operation, the fair and the unfair. Everything should be simple and clear to them. They find it very difficult to understand that the laws have exceptions, that the human being can be good at certain times and less "good" at others, that people, the jurors can not convict a criminal. A very categorical and intractable way of thinking, quite religious too. They are very intolerant of nuances and want everything to be very categorical. We are good or we are not. If we are bad, we must be punished. Injustice is unacceptable to them. They find it difficult to understand the need for legal evidence. For them, sincerity and words are proof in themselves and they do not understand that criminals can lie on the stand and that victims are not believed on the simple account of their experience.
Others are more in the study of laws and acts in society, of facts. They understood that justice is very rarely "fair". They seek to help all of my parties understand that the path to righteousness is strewn with pitfalls and that it will be very trying and abusive for me to take it ... They seek to make me aware that I am will not necessarily be believed, that the judgment will not reflect the suffering I have experienced, that society will not listen to me and surely believe, that the police, journalists, justice will be abusive ... They want me to decide this "endangerment" with full knowledge of the facts and that my goal to testify is "broader" than that of obtaining justice. That I do it in order to make people with IDD visible and who knows perhaps how to help improve the protection of minors by making people understand the serious consequences of chronic abuse on them (or in any case open a small door towards that)? They are quite pessimistic, realistic but seek that I be carried by "a cause", a more "noble" objective than my simple personal justice. They are afraid for me, they want to protect me and warn me. They want to open the eyes of the other parties claiming justice to the reality of it so that I am not destroyed if I decide to testify. They want to transform my suffering and my traumatic history into something bright, positive. To cry out to victims all over the world: you are not alone, I believe you, I hear you, there are beautiful people who hear and see. Don't give up, there is hope.
Other parties are only in the search for "revenge". They want to scream in the face of the world the horror of what they have lived, the immense pain, their rage. All the times we haven't seen, heard, protected, defended them ... They also have a very "religious" vision of justice. They hope for the flames of hell for our executioners, a vengeful justice equal to their suffering. They are in the howl, the cries, the pain. They find it very difficult to understand that their suffering is not proof in itself, that people refuse to hear and see, that their rage and hatred is not followed by society and that everyone does not embrace it. howl with them. For them, the physical sensations, the emotional feelings of trauma are irrefutable evidence and they find it very difficult to understand that people, society do not know and do not see what they are going through inside. Everything is so strong, powerful, the pain is so alive that they don't realize that I am no longer hurt, I am no longer bleeding, the physical evidence is gone. They think and hope that a doctor will be able to see what they experienced on my body, that justice will see their bruised body, will feel their pain ... For them, there is no border, no separation, what they see and feel is engraved and visible on my body and people must necessarily feel and see the same as they do.
Some want to say, as quickly as possible and put everything behind us with this strange belief that once the "sins" are said, confessed, I would finally be delivered, released and that their life can resume its course as if nothing has happened. had happened. As if saying would make all the other dissociative parts with which they have to live together disappear. They too have a fairly religious vision of justice. It's a bit as if telling the police would be like going to confession and washing away all this suffering and coming out snow-white, pure and clean again ...
we work a lot, day after day, to confront all these beliefs with the reality of life and society, but it is a long-term job!
Now, I am able to calm and temper my reactions better and I am less upset in the long term by everything I see unfair in my daily life. I start to perceive better when this or that group of parts is present and I struggle less internally to know which group of parts is right and what reaction I should have.
I manage to better select the struggles and the information for which I want to get involved. I am much more able to listen to the different points of view, take the time to think about them without having a too instinctive reaction and then decide as a group what I want to have as a reaction.
My control parties still have to intervene a lot to temper the reactions of some of these groups. When sharing traumatic experiences, all these parts are excluded (except those which are realistic and anchored in the reality of what justice can bring). If they were present, they would immediately go to the police station to tell everything that was shared without taking into account internal fears, conflicts of loyalty, the fact that we are still missing pieces of the puzzle ... They forget the traumatic amnesia and the fact that I have a lot of dissociative parts which therefore makes my testimony for the moment still very fragmented and chaotic ... Testifying can only be done when all my parts have decided to collaborate and it is still far from being the case!
We victims, must accept that our dissociative, traumatic memory is an internal experience and that even if this experience is part of our daily life, sometimes overwhelms us, people will never be able to understand and feel it identically to us. Our suffering will never be recognized for what it is. The consequences for our torturers will be unjust, minimal compared to what we have experienced.
Jurors in a trial will decide a verdict based on what the law calls "intimate conviction". It is not an impression but a reasoning based on the evidence brought and analyzed at the hearing. So there is a form of emotional detachment to be had. And this is what is most difficult to accept for us victims who are in "hyper emotion and felt" all the more so when there has been dissociative amnesia since in terms of temporality everything mixes up when memories come back, past and present intertwine and become one.
The main categories of evidence are:
- the stories of the victims
- testimonials
- confessions
- the clues
On the cases of rape, justice relies on the following bundles of evidence:
- the repeated and constant accounts of the victim (to the investigators, to the family, to the shrink, to the examining magistrate)
- the psy expertise which attests to the reliability of his speech
- expert reports showing the repercussions of the facts on her life and which reinforce the credibility of what she says
- testimonies (identical stories, ambiguous statements by the respondent, other possible victims, etc.)
- the DNA of the sperm if there is any
- at least partial confessions if the respondent in fact, writings (letters, sms ...) which suggest that ...
- the psychosocial expertise of the respondent showing his deviations, his oddities ...
- photos of the places corroborating the stories ...
When you have a DID, having recourse to justice cannot be done overnight!
First of all because the very principle of TDI is to compartmentalize, to divide the personality in order to survive, at the time of the traumas it was the one and only solution not to die. It takes therefore a huge psychological work upstream to succeed in modifying this mode of survival and saving which has become instinctive and automatic until we are able to say: this is all I have experienced, this is what I have experienced. 've felt, this is what they did to me ... And it is all the more difficult when the account of an event is shared between several dissociative parts. Some having kept the memory of the place, others the physical feelings, others the words of the aggressor, others the tastes or the sounds ... And if there is not a full cooperation of the parties how succeed in dating a rape with precision when 10, 20, 100 others have subsequently taken place in similar circumstances when one has been raped and abused for 18 years? Who would accept to remember voluntarily the worst moments of his life, the moments when he thought he was dying?
No one can completely change their thinking and the way they work overnight. We cannot be "someone else" just by deciding it ... It is done little by little, by confronting our beliefs, by experimenting, by reflecting on who we want to be, who we are and what we want to live in the future and by experiencing the security of everyday life ... And those will be the positive experiences, the external "signs" showing us that this choice is "beneficial "for us who will consolidate our decision and will ensure that we persist in this way. It will be the fact that other people are able to hear our stories that will make us appropriate them as personal experiences, and that these memories will become our memories, that we will no longer feel the need to flee and protect ourselves from them. , see them as foreign to us ...
A person with DID needs to experience that people are ready to listen to them, to believe them, to support them, to defend them, to help them, to protect them ... before they can successfully modify their compartmentalization behavior. She must restore her confidence in human beings, restore her self-esteem, her vision of herself, her understanding of what she has been through, identify the lies her rapists have told her, understand her rights and the violations of the law that have been made upon her ... She must relearn as a very young child to identify her feelings, allow herself to express them and feel them as part of herself. It must analyze and dissect the mechanisms implemented to objectify it, make it a slave. To accept to mourn his dream of ideal parent, of savior ... To modify his modes of human relations, his vision of sexual relations, love, friendship, his relationship to loneliness and abandonment. .. and separate the reality of what these relationships and emotions are from what she has experienced and the lies that have been instilled in her through torture and death threats.
All of this takes a long time and requires immense strength and courage!
And for justice, the more time passes, the more material evidence is reduced ...
We need more people to understand what DID is, how to spot the signs to identify us, how to help us and gain confidence so that we can open up to them, how to engage with us ...
We need to find people of trust with whom each of our dissociative parties can speak, question and confront their beliefs with the reality of our here and now because this is what will allow us to move faster towards cooperation and mutual understanding!
And this is all the more true concerning justice!
I would like to find helping people, professionals of justice, laws with whom each of these groups of parties seeking justice can dialogue so that they realize the pitfalls in their reasoning, the reality to which they will have to comply and adjust their hopes for reparation.
In an ideal world, I dream of shrinks, doctors, gynecologists, dentists, neurologists, journalists, lawyers and judges who all cooperate with one and the same goal to ensure that no more than one child on this earth does not need to be fragmented to be able to continue to be alive ...
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