Some time ago, I read the book "The Sum of my parts" by Olga Trujillo, a TDI like me. In her book, she says that she found a shrink who supported and helped her in her path of reconstruction. She had a supportive husband and then a companion now who gives her the emotional security she needs. And she was also fortunate enough to work in a place where she could tell who she was and get help if needed when she was at work. And a circle of friends to whom she was able to talk and make people understand what she was going through and had gone through.
My parties have long understood that I must find this too. And that's what I've been looking for for a long time.
As a teenager, I tried to escape the sect, the first time by joining an organization that took teenagers around the world for a year, then by trying to escape with another young person (this was discovered and stopped).
My marriage was arranged with the son of one of my rapists. I was bound hand and foot. I somehow understood that I had to use the "system". My main rapist's wife was looking for training so that she could use it in the cult afterwards. I "used" this to get a degree and a job. I passed my license. I thus had a certain autonomy. Thanks to this training, I was able to be unsupervised from time to time, I made friends, a support network.
Make sure you are autonomous enough to be able to survive. I held on until I could finally flee.
I opened a bank account in my name, and a few years later I bought my first car, and found a place where I felt safe ...
And little by little I changed my way of reasoning and thinking. I learned to detach myself from religion and its dictates. I learned to recognize when violence was exercised against me and little by little to detach myself from it and no longer suffer it.
I learned what freedom was. Freedom to have friends, freedom to go where I wanted, freedom in my schedule, freedom to choose ... I'm still learning it ...
I have learned and am still learning what love and friendship are. The importance of a healthy bond, the place of freedom in this bond.
I'm starting to understand what a job is. What are my rights and my duties and those of my boss. The fact that I am not a slave and that if a person helps me and is benevolent that does not mean that I owe him / her for life.
And I learned to live in society, to have a "normal" life.
It took me 9 years to achieve this and I still have a lot to learn!
During these 9 years, I looked for people able to help and support me.
Looked for a professional who helps me to renew the dialogue and understand my functioning. I chained the shrinks, the oddballs ... Until I found my current shrink.
I looked for friends who could understand me and help me. Lots of disappointments ...
I tried to tell my family what had happened to me, what had happened under their noses. There too many disappointments. Two of my family are in righteousness and in the Church. They listened to me but it stops there. Only my sister made the effort to understand, to document and help me on a daily basis. My mother also remains open and agrees to listen and tries to understand. I'm lucky because few traumatized people have this.
Yet this is what we need the most!
Finally, having an entourage and an environment in which we felt sufficiently safe is THE condition for successfully overcoming and facing our traumas.
I understood it for a long time. We have to experiment, test, search until we finally find.
As a dissociated person, our survival depends on several factors.
First and foremost, extract ourselves from this deadly environment in which we were raised and get to safety. Then find people ready to listen to us, finally believe us and help us build a secure environment around us.
Once this is done, we must rebuild ourselves.
Rebuild and be reborn.
These words are correct. We are reborn by understanding who we are, what we went through, and what we had to do to survive. Making a diagnosis of dissociation or dissociative identity disorder allows us to understand everything we experience on a daily basis, who we are.
And rebuild. Rebuild our life, rebuild our action plans, rebuild our thinking, put words into what we have experienced, put the facts in their place. Reconstruct our identity, our self-esteem, our rights, our relationship to our body and modify our survival and safeguard mechanisms ...
For this we need to experience new human relationships, different purposes to our experiences.
Some of my parts have been raped by a hypnotherapist, abused by psychiatrists. I had to test again and again until I found the professional who would not benefit from my dissociation. Find a way to trust and not depend. I am constantly testing this link and my shrink understands and accepts it. She gave me the freedom to express it without judging and condemning. She accepts criticism, works with me to find ways to maintain this healthy bond. Encourage my wary parts and thank them for their vital role in my system.
I looked for people, a helping entourage. All my life. In the sect, people were too under control, they refused to see, to hear, to ask questions. They had lost all capacity for identity, reflection, thought ... Then when I fled, the people in society were no better. My story was so far removed from their reality that it was inconceivable, unthinkable ... to say was again impossible, forbidden.
For a long time I have turned and linked with people I felt hurt, similar to me. Subconsciously thinking that their personal wounds could bring us closer together and allow us to understand and help each other. Almost all of the people I have bonded with have experienced some form of violence as a child. What I didn't understand was that most of these people had the same defenses and protections as me. My story reactivated theirs and we were caught in a circle of mutual reactivation, helping and harming each other. We finally had the opportunity to speak and recount our sufferings but at the same time hearing those of the other reactivated our own wounds and we were in perpetual flight or reproduction of the mistreatment that we had experienced. A lot of the friends I've had have dissociation, some of them I think have DID ...
Today, I believe I have finally found some pillar people.
My shrink who helps me understand myself and renew the inner dialogue. She helps me to face all my traumas, to learn new things, to trust myself, to love myself, to see all the strength that there is in me ...
My sister who supports me on a daily basis and makes the link with my past, gives weight and reality to what I have lived. The fact that she believes me and does not deny repairs a lot of my wounds.
A place to work where I am safe. The person who hires me knows my TDI and supports me and helps me to maintain stability in my job and in the present.
In the last few days I have lost my working skills a lot. I discussed it with my boss, I was able to show him how sometimes I could be terrified, lost. This "test" that was done (several days of blockage where I presented myself to him only as a little girl lost and paralyzed, terrorized) allowed many of my parts to reassure themselves and feel safe. My boss understood how I work, he knows how to reassure me and help me regain my faculties and my skills. The gift he gives me is immense for me!
When we have to heal from dissociation, an extremely difficult thing is to allow our parts "lost in the past and in trauma" to come and experience and live our present of the here and now. For that, we need a benevolent entourage who understands and accepts this! We need to remove the walls between our operations, make sure we cooperate and use all of our skills at the same time. We must confront our beliefs with our life today to readjust and modify them. We must accept to feel contradictory things, to confront our glance on the world and the company to no longer treat the information which we draw from it in term of "black" or "white".
And this can only be done by finding a caring and understanding entourage. People able to understand our changes and help us move forward towards the unification of our operating methods. People who agree to exchange, see and discern all of our dissociative parts.
The path to reconstruction goes through dealing with memories of trauma but also and above all by relearning who we are, who we want to be, which will make us happy and fulfilled ... To be in the present, to project ourselves into the future. Exist and be autonomous without being chained to traumas experienced in our past that dictate our reactions.
Having an entourage who understands TDI, who knows how to spot when I switch, who understands that my actions at a given moment do not totally define me, allows me to grow, to mature and dare to discover who I am and what I want to do with this new life that is offered to me. My parts can thus come and I can finally dare to express aloud all my feelings and all my thoughts. I finally have the right to be "me", a complex human who feels things, who feels pain, sadness, despair, joy, happiness, love, friendship, peace, rage, anger, indignation, injustice, guilt, indifference ... I have the right to finally be all of this at the same time I no longer have to be divided and feel only one way of being at the same time. It allows me to see the world and to deal with its brutality differently, to be less on edge, to take a step back. I am learning to protect myself, to understand what I think and feel. I am less and less fragmented in my functioning. I'm less afraid too. Thanks to all these experiences that I have been doing over the past few years, I manage to keep hope, I know that my condition is temporary, I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
That my entourage understands the necessity and the importance that each part come before and share the here and now is essential! This is what allows them to evolve, to understand that the here and now is now secure and that they are no longer in danger, to realize that some of their thinking patterns, some of their beliefs no longer correspond to the current situation, to be able to dialogue with other parties who share their different point of view and help each other adapt to the here and now.
My sister sent me this text and I find her image very beautiful and very representative:
"In what I understood, the sharing that helps to move forward, I see it as if each part in turn had to deposit its little touch of color on the walls of your apartment / on the here and now, the parts small come out to put shades of pink, the control parts deposit touches of blue, each with its own shade, the angry parts each deposit a small touch of red each time they come in front, the "coward" parts deposit a little purple, the mom parts dress the wall with shades of yellow and orange, others add touches of green ...
And it is all of each of them, which allowed survival in the past, which will dress the here and now with all the colors of life ...
For there to be a balance, each part must have its place and allow the others to take their place in front. Otherwise we see life in pink, but it is not all pink ... Or we will see life in black but it is not all black ... It is this balance that seemed important to me to underline ... "
Help us put a rainbow in our life ... We need our shrinks to be trained but not only! Our entourage, our boss, our co-workers, our friends too must help us ... We need everyone around us to understand and support us!
Healing from IDD is not just accepting our traumatic past, it is rebuilding our "me", our broken identity. It is for this reason that it is so difficult, so long and so complex. By raping us, they not only destroyed and dirty our bodies, they also destroyed every bit of our identity.
We need you.
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