Hi brat,
If you're looking for labels, then I can refer to what the mercy had been said as DID(Dissociative identity disorder)
Sometimes doctors misdiagnose Patients as having posttraumatic stress disorder.
In psychological terms "parts" are defined as "ALTER PERSONALITIES". The following information is the short summary from the book( Dialogues With Forgotten Voices: Relational Perspectives On Child Abuse Trauma And The Treatment Of Severe Dissociative Disorders) about the "part" or "ALTER" and SHAME AND SELF-HATE and its functioning in DID.You can be familiar with some aspects of this disorder and what mercy has actually meant.
Putnam (1989) succinctly defines alter personalities as "highly discrete states of consciousness organized around a prevailing affect [and] sense of self (including body image) with a limited repertoire of behaviors and a set of state dependent memories"
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.
Children build their alter personalities from the raw materials available to them, but their multiple identities are shaped as they mature by influences in the larger society: DID patients may absorb values, attitudes, and stereotypes from family, race, religion, ethnic and other communities, the media (Kluft, 1994), and even from their own individual histories in the mental health system.
Such a complex dissociative defense as the development of alter personalities is not put into place after one traumatic episode; however, the personality fracturing arising from a single event may create the preconditions—malleability and dislocations in both personality and brain chemistry. The more severe and continuous the trauma, the more challenges to the victim, the more complex the dissociative defenses must become.
Victims end up with too many identities, each and all of which are insufficient to anchor them in time, space, and relationship. Most highly dissociative individuals are quite uncomfortable about being seen switching from one to another and will not acknowledge the process even to therapists until real trust is developed (Kluft, 1994). Many actually generate strategies to mask switching from themselves, including the design of special alters to cover the multiplicity in general and the switching phenomena in particular.
Multiplicity exists on a continuum, and according to Kluft (1988b) the degree of multiplicity experienced by any one individual depends on the amount and severity of the trauma, the degree of dysfunction, the amount and quality
of the internal communication among part-selves, and the degree to which the different alters or "parts" cooperate. Networks of alter personalities can vary greatly in their size, their permeability, and in the way aggression is distributed among them to serve developmental functions, trauma containment, and the self-hatred that keeps much of the system running.
One part-self can have a totally loving, deferential, idealizing bond with a parent and refer to him as "my" father while another calls the same man "the" father or "her" father or a "parental unit" or "that other person who does what the adults want." Some alters may hate that parent and some do not know him at all.
In extreme cases of possession or dissociated will, DID patients report feeling like the passive and obedient instrument of the will of another
Negotiating tangled ownership of responsibility is one of the most difficult aspects of treatment
Types of Alters:
Goulding and Schwartz (1995) organize alters by roles, conceptualizing three groups—exiles, firefighters, and managers.
Exiles contain needs or traumatic memories and embody sensitivity and fears; often child-identified and
frozen in time, they perpetually relive the trauma as if it is happening in the moment.
Firefighters, invested with a "negative specialness" that Briere(1989) calls the power to do bad, are assertive, high-energy, highly a utomatic,controlling parts who relate primarily on the basis of distrust and oneupmanship,
act out impulsively and destructively, identify with the perpetrator, and adopt unwise, expedient protective behaviors
Managers permit the individual to function on a daily basis and maintain a facade of normalcy and unity ; devoted to work and cunningly manipulative, they actualize high ambitions, tend to be hypomanic, obsessive-compulsive, and socially ingratiating, fear psychological work and cannot tolerate intimacy, and kill off spontaneity by distracting, placating, rationalizing, and avoiding
Ross (1997) addresses these phenomena under the umbrella of "host resistance" (p. 276), whereby a conscientious, victimized, and often tearful, pathetic host personality entreats the therapist's help in learning about
him/herself and getting better—but completely decompensates any time other alters speak or reveal memories. Such a host is enacting the collaborator message "not to communicate" and "not to know" entrenched in the pathogenic family system. And when that host covertly reinforces the rapid switching and acting out on the part of his / her alters, Ross (1997) concludes that the problem is not that the alters come out uncontrollably, but that the host decides to let them out, again enacting the dissimulation, avoidance, irresponsibility, and inconsistency that took place throughout childhood. Ross's worst host-resistance scenario occurs when the host purposefully renders false (increasingly horrendous and extravagant) memories to distract from the real work of therapy, such that the more s/he reveals, the less is actually known
And somethings about SHAME AND SELF-HATE
In children, chronic shaming leads to chronic dissociation, and chronic reliance on dissociation inevitably leads victims back to experiencing chronic shame.In severe dissociative disorders, shame is so pervasive that the continuous psychological struggle to repress and dissociate it seriously depletes the patient's life energy.
Chronic humiliation and scorn generate profound feelings of defectiveness, weakness, and unworthiness (Nathanson, 1987), leading eventually to a turnoff of all affects and the erection of an empathic wall against exposure to and being overwhelmed by other people's emotions. (Empathic walls are part of what sustains separations between alter personalities.) Child-abuse survivors, like most oppressed groups, experience the particularly entrenched form of shame that comes out of the prolonged distress of forced helplessness and powerlessness. Victims often hate themselves for their vulnerability (and not their perpetrators), and their self-hatred can become a perverse home-base, one they are reluctant to leave in spite of its suffocating
limitations:" even though they understand at some (entirely separate) intellectual level that they could not have prevented or changed tilings in any way, they feel tremendous shame for their complicity and incapacity to halt the
abuse and end their subjugation. And this shame is profoundly silencing— victims feel complicated allegiance to their victimizers as a function of dynamics ranging from traumatic attachment to mind control.
The compounded shame of the dissociative trauma survivor leads to psychic imprisonment and sense of exile from humanity because it is based on multiple interlocking and overlapping sources. Shame comes from:
• the pain, humiliation, betrayal, and degradation endured during thetrauma;
• the inability to have protected the self and stopped the traumatic event(s) from taking place, the inability to prevent their impact and avoid experiencing loss of control, and (in some cases) the inability to have preempted the abuse of others;
• the coerced violation of your own ethics or moral principles, the betrayal/ violation of others in order to survive;
• the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and the societal response to those symptoms, including psychiatric labels, diagnoses, and misdiagnoses;
• the fragmentation, intrusion, inconsistency, and incompleteness of memories, and the constant challenge to their reality from skeptics in media, academic, medical, and psychotherapeutic settings;
• the feeling of not being like other people, not belonging, and the loss of a sense of kinship with humanity;
• the feeling of being marked, damaged, and transparent—the feeling that others can see right through you and know what you have done or what has been done to you;
• the social stigma of being an abuse survivor and the internalization of
society's contempt, incredulity, and impatience with the vicissitudes
of recovery ("just get over it already"), and the labeling of your therapist
(perhaps the only person you trust) as a quack;
• the internalization of hateful, degrading messages from the perpetrators)
and from society's blame-the-victim/ pull-yourself-up-by-yourown-
bootstraps rhetoric, and the harboring of "dirty" secrets thatcannot be shared;
• the harboring of hateful, vengeful, destructive thoughts (and /or partselves);
• the perversion of your sexuality and the residue of bizarre, unusual,or utterly absent sexual needs and desires;
• the awareness that you welcomed feelings of specialness or actualprivileges conferred by the perpetrator(s);
• the inability to forgive perpetrators in a culture that insists on and romanticizes
forgiveness;
• the vulnerability to experiencing certain normal activities as triggers (e.g., films, holidays, gatherings), such that they cannot be enjoyed;
• the history of self-destructive acting out, and the accrued costs of the effects of trauma in terms of vocational, financial, medical, and interpersonal functioning;
• the chronic out-of-control feelings and the knowledge that other people
do not walk around leaking profound losses, sensitivities, and
vulnerabilities "like someone with a bladder problem—only this one's emotional";
• the psychological and physiological damage that will never heal in spite of your own (and others') best efforts
