Brat,
Can you think about this situation as if you had a foster child who had been deprived of food and abused for her whole life. Then, she was entrusted to you for the help she needed. What would you do for her? What would be comfort food for her? Does she need soft music to feel safe enough to eat? How would you act toward her to show her that she has value? Would you call her names or would you notice some small things that she can do and encourage her.
A T. said to me early on that I had to learn to be my own mother, I thought she was kidding. What a joke! MY MOTHER ! No. No not her, me. Be the mother I was to my kids for me. I rejected the idea at first. I didn't deserve it but by then I just was glimpsing that I might have some worth. I thought about that. I pondered that idea for a long time. Then, I realized that I would have liked to have had me for a mother. I bought some play dough. I took myself for short walks, and bought the tape of Baby Baluga again since it had been playing in the cars for years.
You are already a step ahead of me since you still go to the store and buy fruits and veggies and milk. That foster kid is going to be one lucky kid! Even if she likes to smoke. I know some 11yr. olds who smoke.
Is it time to raise yourself?
I hope you don't get me wrong, but I found the idea of a foster parent a bit hard to swallow. For me, It didn't work. I made parts of your sentence bold in which the term "mother" refers to "self" and "She, Her, kids, who" refers to "non-self".
Ross (1994), capturing the essence of DID, calls it "an auto-immune disorder in which the psyche has become confused about the distinction between self and non-self, and has learned to turn its destructive mechanisms on the self, mistaking it for a foreign invader.
And as I mentioned before, Fine (1999) views alter personalities as
personified adaptational strategies that may be representations of conflicts, fears, and/or wishes, ultimately representing a traumatized child's desire to not face overwhelming experiences alone.
So The development of alters, although purely structural, self-regulatory, and adaptive, is one of the more colorful aspects of extreme dissociative living. The literature describes a wide range of different types. among them: host personalities, child alters, internal persecutors, internalself-helpers, suicidal personalities, protectors and helpers, memory trace personalities, cross-gender personalities, promiscuous alters, administrators and obsessive-compulsive personalities, substance abusers, autistic and handicapped alters, analgesic personalities, imitators and impostors, demons and spirits, personalities with special talents and skills, guardians of memories and secrets, avengers, expressers of hidden impulses, and defenders of or apologists for the abusers.
Camouflage can break down and dissociative disorders reveal themselves in response to small triggers (a book, a movie, a therapist's inquiry) or major life crises (a death, a divorce, having a child, losing a job) or in the presence of real love and intimacy, as was the case for me.
I cannot exactly tell why this happens, but through my studies, I came across a subject about " loss of language" that I think has something to do with this situation.
Intense and overwhelming pain that is not met with human contact, compassion,and soothing is one of the
primary driving forces behind dissociative solutions, particularly when the traumatized child's (or adult's) need for soothing is greeted by further abuse, humiliation, and/or abandonment (including denial).
The resulting isolation and appropriation of the victim's pain by the abuser(s) further sequesters the wounded, tortured self, and makes the individual hostage to an internalized dissociative system of perverted power
dynamics. In that system, constructed under extreme conditions and elaborated during the prolonged captivity of childhood, any proximity to pain or even its relocation in memory is prohibited—and the victim's own mechanisms
of denial are often lubricated by the perpetrator's conscious attempts at decontextualizing and recontextualizing his/her experiences. The language that would otherwise express those experiences is avoided, distorted, or deleted; in psychotherapy, insight alone will not be able to access what is thoroughly out of the intellect's communicative reach.
Since verbal language is either unavailable or inadequate to describe the intensity of the chronic trauma survivor's internal states, s/he is "left with a mute hopelessness about the possibility of communicating in a way that will
help . . . get critical needs met. Words then seem to take on terrifying proportions; they are both too powerful and completely useless"
The natural capacity to dissociate is "the escape when there is no escape"
When traumatic relational events overwhelm and shatter the vulnerable self, all the mental contents that constitute one's self and one's world—including one's voice, which generates and is generated by language—cease to exist ; what remains is pure negation
Dissociation, a surrealistic set of discontinuities and disparities related to identity, awareness, and responsibility, sustains the survival of the traumatized individual by
restricting the scope of the self—that is, by
excluding the
insupportable from the self-system.
Cohen (1996) organizes the dissociative exclusions into four essential features:
not me (signaling the development of alter parts);
not now (characterizing incapacity to remain in or experience the present);
not then (indicating disavowal of personal history); and not ever (identifying lack of hope, even of future orientation).
Constructing elaborate dissociative defenses while keeping
toxic emotional states at bay (Briere, 1995) isolates the survivor of chronic abuse in bondage to the past.
T
he preservation of some boundary between self and not-self prevents the complete collapse of personhood (Btomberg, 1998); indeed, it restores sanity. Dissociation hypnoidally unlinks incompatible states of consciousness, allowing them only separate access to awareness—that is, in the form of unconnected mental experiences—(Bromberg, 1994).
And once separated, dissociated mental contents—behavior, affect, sensation, knowledge (Braun, 1984)—or interpersonal patterns (Pearlman and Saakvitne, 1995) coexist in parallel streams of consciousness without interacting and even without reference to one another. In the absence of intersection (much less conflict) between good and bad memories of a person or experience, the highly dissociative individual is not alerted to incongruity and thus not moved to resolve it.
The internal confusion and detectable inconsistencies that result from the strenuous psychological effort to avoid psychic conflict, pain, and disorien ration must be camouflaged on an ongoing basis. Both the survivor who
daily lives with this disjointed internal reality and those who get close enough to him/her to notice must continuously develop explanations to fill in the gaps.
Whereas repression maintains psychic material in the dynamic unconscious (Gabbard, 1994),
dissociation preserves and suspends it in an array of parallel self-states and parallel fragments of consciousness, and they in turn can be multidimensionally sequestered, amplified, elaborated, and personified by a variety of fantasy operations.
'The dissociative system is like a labyrinth of mirrors and trapdoors, and the dissociative process the ultimate intrapsychic trickster. It reverses cause and effect and self and other configurations, and obscures (or lies about) the individual's connections to his/her history. Lost in time, fragmented in identity, hypervigilant to the possibility of exposure while ostensibly guarding against all manner of other catastrophes, and truly confused in all relationships though pretending not to be, dissociative survivors become the victims of their own dissociative roller coasters
.
Tragically, the vicious cycles involving impression-management and avoidance of feelings, memories,
and detection frequently cause people (professionals included) to doubt and distrust everything severely dissociative trauma survivors have to say.
Although much remains to be learned, it is clear that young childrenemotionally processing overwhelming and violent experiences and that they deploy dissociation as a way to master and contain traumatic affect and preserve some kind of meaning amidst mindshattering events. Once the dissociative-survival process is set in motion, they lose control over personality changes and neurochemical alterations and sustain permanent damage to the integrated sense of agency
Interestingly, I found the language, speech, words, dialogues or whatever you call it, can create a bridge between parallel streams of consciousness. The memory is unreliable, but not the sensation. People can easily convince themselves they've seen things that never happened. It's when the host(self) purposefully renders false memories.
In order to survive outrageous abuse and brutality, the chronically traumatized have lost and forgotten their voices.
So I spoke on behalf of them(alter), of what they were feeling, and suddenly I realized that some of them even don't know each other, each of them lived in a quite different world with their own beliefs, behavior, attitude and...
My various alter personalities fought and vied for power. Some of them told me to go to the hell, who are you? Some had compassion for me. Some praised me, and I was wondering Who's Who? Am I another alters ??
but, at least they are interacting with one another now. So you may have no idea who they really are, what they want, she may want her mother (I mean real mother, your mother and her mother) to buy her some play dough, or maybe she needs to take a walk with her real mother or father or friends.
I think it's good idea to have dialogues with your forgotten voices.
