“For the seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out, and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like a complete destruction.” — Cynthia Occelli
I used to be a broken child. I believed myself to be shattered beyond repair. I thought hope was the most irrational of all the emotions. Despite knowing something would not be, a person would hope it possible. Hope is different than faith. You believe when you have faith. You may not see it, you may not ever have tangible proof – yet you do not waiver in your belief or your loyalty to it as truth. Hope is not that. People hope for things they don’t believe are possible – or rather – things they desperately want but doubt as truly feasible or realistically possible. This is how I thought about healing.
My Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis felt like a life sentence. I realized that my whole life had been dictated by these alters – people – I never knew I had inside me. Perhaps, that is inaccurate. I always knew about the voices. I heard them. Since I was a young child, since as far as I can remember. I debated with them. Listened to them argue amongst themselves. I believed the things they called me. Secretly I understood they existed but questioned if this was entirely abnormal. Didn’t everyone have voices speak to them sometimes? Okay, maybe it wasn’t sometimes. Okay, maybe it was A LOT of voices. Okay, maybe it was behaviors I didn’t understand, or remember. Or things that made sense when doing them, and then, suddenly didn’t. I would no longer think that way or feel that way. I would feel something else. But one thing I never felt was right in my body. I felt like an alien. I described it as wearing an “Edgar suit” – from Men in Black. I wore this human skin to fool people into thinking I was one of them, but if you looked closer, you could see it was a costume. It hid the monster I felt I was. It helped me BE what people wanted in any given moment. It helped me to pretend to be one of them. But no, no I was never like everyone else.
After my diagnosis, I became entangled in the inner workings of my alters and yearned to be free of the torture in my mind. I craved silence. To not think, I had imagined, would be the greatest peace. With time and guidance, I learned that to quell the screaming in my brain, I needed to get to know and work with my alters. Create a cooperative self-system, they said. Not as easy to execute as one would think. At times I resented them, their interference in my life. Then, I realized how much I depended on them. How thoroughly they saved me. At first, I didn’t believe in a ‘me’. I did not know if ‘I’ even existed. But some of my alters created an entire diagram and mathematical equation to prove that I was there – inside.
The greatest challenge in accepting my diagnosis was admitting that he succeeded in killing me. He had prevented me from even existing. He took not only my innocence as a child, tortured me and my siblings, and left me reeling with fear. I believed he took the essence of who I could have been, or wanted to be, and shattered it into pieces, too small and fragmented to ever put back together.
Since I was prepubescent, I struggled with self-mutilation, depression, suicide ideation, anxiety, OCD compulsions, overwhelming fear, panic, and self-isolation, obvious complex PTSD, and RAGE. The pain clouded my sight and became the lens through which I saw the world. Always – always – treading water to keep from drowning. My memory was marred by abuse – physical, sexual, emotional, mental – threats of murder, attempts even! I encountered death and loss, devastating losses. I lived in a foster home and was even adopted. But never really escaped. Verbal and psychological abuse continued. Filled with shame and self-blame, I wandered through the world – reacting but hardly ever choosing. I tried to kill myself multiple times in the most passive ways – I suppose because I didn’t want to die, I simply wanted an end to the pain. Well, it wasn’t so much I as it was a we. We grew up resenting our own hope. A fruitless and irrational thing to hang onto.
For a while we abandoned the notion that I was in there, somewhere. Instead we threw ourselves into organizing our system, working with rather than against each other. We all had a purpose. In finding it, we were able to help each other express ourselves. How surprising it was! Realizing that not fighting with each other reduced our anguish. We drew the way we saw ourselves. We tried to understand this complex ball of string that was our brain.
I say all of this in the past tense. Because none of this is who I am now. I am an integrated person now. I am happy. Truly happy. That rage that was always on the surface, is gone. The torture and pain are gone. The heartbreak I could feel deep inside, so strong I feared it alone would kill me – now it is a memory. It took work, of course. Finding the right therapist was part of the equation but didn’t account for all the integers needed. I am not only surviving now, but I am thriving! If you are wondering how I went from A to Z, well, then welcome to my blog – Defying Trauma. Do you know the song Defying Gravity? Gravity is a force of nature. Something that physically is impossible to fight. It is inevitable. It happens to you without permission, without consent, without choice. This reminds me of trauma. Regardless of where in my life I was, the trauma was a force I tried to fight against but never could. It kept me down. Held me there, sometimes underwater and unable to breathe. Defying the fear helped me to learn how to defy the trauma. And my life has never felt more like my own than it does now.
I could have done none of this healing or growth without hope. Hope for a different way of feeling, thinking and being. Hope that I could live beyond my tattered past and fractured self. For something that felt so irrational and at the time, fruitless – now seems to be the one thing that helped me to reach my goal. Despite my greatest critics (self-imposed or otherwise) my hope kept me moving forward. It helped me heal. Now I hope I can share this knowledge, this experience, with others. With you or yous. And let you know, pain doesn’t have to be your future, regardless of its intrusion in your past and present.
