Supernova 1: Pain

     The effects of sexual assault is nearly indescribable pain.  It is called soul murder, because it is the most efficient way to kill some one's spirit without killing their body.  It is so emotionally painful and difficult, I don't think I have heard of a single person facing it unless they had no other choice.  Recovery from incest has been the most unexpected and painful thing of my life.  Difficulty breathing at any point in the day from sheer emotional pain happens all the time.  I didn't know pain like this could exist.  People always painted a vague picture of my life down the road, and they forgot to mention the huge ravine that opens up unexpectedly out of the hazy horizon and swallows you up, the hot dusty trudge out of infinity after having tumbled to the bottom.  It is common after having experienced violation to think "that did not happen", or even as it is occurring, "this is not happening".  It is not on our list of possibilities for what life could have in store.  I remember as a child seeing it coming, and waiting for someone to save me at the last minute because what was about to happen and what did happen was impossible.

     Dealing With the Impossible.

 

     That is what recovery from sexual assault is.  Doing an impossible thing.  Surviving after soul murder, and in some remarkable cases, doing more than surviving after soul murder.  It is not something you could ask someone to do.  It is not something you could expect them to do.  The huge problem with people expecting survivors to move on, or forgive, is that it minimizes their pain.  As in mistaking a ferocious tiger in the room for a soft tiny kitten.  It cannot be ignored, it requires your full undivided attention, and you can only hope for everyone in the room to escape alive while realizing that the hope that everyone will get out unscathed is unattainable.  Anyone who expects another to get up and move on from that pain does not understand it.  All you can do is sit with them next to the pain, hope for them, cry with them, and be astounded if and when they overcome.

     The problem for those that want to forgive and restore old relationships, and a fair number do, is that in order for it to work the abuser would need to change.  The only cases of perpetrators changing are the ones who were accused and proven guilty, and forced into therapy.  I have never heard of a sexual perpetrator freely choosing to stop hurting his (and sometimes her) victims, ever.  Many of them say they will, and there are many stories of victims agreeing to stay and try to work things out, only to be hurt repetitively until they cut off the relationship and leave.  If they survive that long, as sexual crimes often accompany or include violence, and many are not that lucky.  If after that they escape the ranks of those survivors killed by severe depression and suicide, they are indeed tough.  I say tough rather than fortunate, because the life of a survivor of sexual assault is only a good one if they make it so through sheer will, as many remarkably do.

     I hardly need to go on about the pain of being victimized in sexual crimes.  Any Internet search will overflow with blogs, journals, and forums.  Every person who reads this will be well acquainted with a survivor of sexual assault and PAIN written in their eyes, in their skin, in their life, whether the reader realizes it or not.
     Society has only begun to recognize and acknowledge that pain.  Coming to a point where they can fully grasp and face that amount of pain seems years in the future.  A point for society to take an honest look at the lives of the perpetrators who caused that mass pain seems eons in the future.  Not to cover it up the issue as we are doing now, but to really look at it and strive to understand it.  Nothing can be fixed unless you understand it.  And concerning sexual crime, I don't think America or the world realizes the magnitude of what needs to be fixed.

 

Supernova

     Reading about the recent attacks in Norway I am reminded again that life is so very precious.  What you do with it is so very precious.  These reminders seem unnecessary, poignant, and more and more frequent.  Our everyday lives ripped open to reveal the human soul in all its beauty and anguish that we had somehow forgotten about for more than a few seconds each day.  I stopped at a report of this attack on my way to my blog, and the emotion and energy seeping from the article itself was overwhelming.  Surely the world is grieving.  It was the complete opposite of what I came to do: attempt to understand the world from an attacker's point view.  Such a thing always seems unthinkable, the ultimate betrayal, and I am only strongly reminded of this but still know it is something that needs to be done, and is not yet done nearly enough.

     As a victim of incest I am perhaps put in a different place than victims of other crimes because all the crimes done against me were interlaced with love.  My love for them.  Maybe because of that I am driven to understand evil, understand how anyone could commit evil, how they could be without conscience.  I know that all the answers the world has given me to understand it is not enough.  I know with every fiber of my being that every human being is good at their core.  If I reach out to someone energetically, there are different levels to reach.  There is a person's physical, their emotional, their mental.  There is what they hide from everyone.  Sometimes these layers are very deep.  And under that, at the very core of them, I cannot even reach out to, because it is like trying to touch a supernova, it is so brilliant, so blinding and bright.  Every person has this.  Every person is a supernova.  There are no exceptions.  I know that no one is born evil, and no one commits evil without having first learned of it by having it committed against them.  And finally I know that no person is ever beyond hope.  I do not need the world to tell me these things.  Perhaps since I have not yet heard it I need to tell the world these things.



Incognito

breaking away

     I felt a twinge of identification with Casey Anthony this week as she left to go into hiding.  Her case completely aside just the fact that she is about to set out by herself to make a new life, keep her old life and identity in hiding, be placed in a completely different environment and expected to adapt.  Everything about her life, her beliefs, identity, connections, and home, has been pulled up by the roots and now she is to replant somewhere else.  Perhaps that is not the best comparison, and certainly could be a very touchy one, but I recognized someone who has to recognize life completely outside of the norm, of what they expected life to be.  Outcast.  Someone who has dealt or been dealt with something unacceptable to society and shunned or ignored.  I'm sure survivors of abuse may be Casey Anthony's biggest opponents, but I can't help seeing a connection between the victims and perpetrators in child and sexual abuse, whether they are guilty or innocent, that is they are connected to something society would rather not talk about and so they are ignored.  The only difference being that someone guilty of these is only shunned if they get caught, whereas someone innocent of these, a victim, is shunned regardless.
     As a multiple, being shunned is often more from awkward circumstance than something deliberately done by anyone.  It's just that life is drastically different, not just outside my head but inside it.  I am no longer the person people expect me to be.  I never had any expectations for my life as an adult.  I didn't really expect to make it that far.  Not that I expected to die, but that I expected someone else to come take my place in my body, someone more suited for the job, who would actually enjoy that life.  I would turn into someone else.  It had happened before.  I had practice letting someone else be me, though I hadn't thought about it directly.  I didn't turn into someone else this time.  I wasn't able to create any new 'else's'.  And all my old ones came out with different lives that didn't match at all. 
     Very few people believe me.  My therapist has told me I will have to get used to that.  I don't blame them, I hardly believe myself most of the time.  To believe it means you would have to accept that something really bad happened, and that was just not my life.  I couldn't let it be so.  The more I remember other alters' memories, the more I am distanced from my old life, and all the people I had enlisted to pretend with me that it wasn't that bad.  Because I can't pretend to myself anymore.  Merging with another alters perspective is like having a shadow that was just out of your line of vision come into view and slowly merge into you.  I remember things that someone else in my body saw that I had promised to forget.  It helps lesson the headaches, there is less of a jolt and less shock.  I recognize somebody else with different likes and tastes and thought patterns but I remember their memory.
     It is very isolating.  Nothing in my life is what I thought it was, no one I knew is who I thought they were.  I don't want anyone to get too close and see how badly I was hurt, how vulnerable I am.  It changes everything.  I recognize now in relationships where I thought the other was the strong one and I clung to them for support and recognition, I was the strong one and usually got taken advantage of because I didn't know it.  Nothing in my head that I thought was mine is mine.  Life changed, not just physical things on the outside but the fabric that made my life up; every belief I had, every thing I thought I knew.  Every relationship I had is different than I thought.  Every memory I have is different than I thought.  I am smarter and stronger than I ever knew, and I have been hurt far worse than I ever knew.
     Relating to other people is different for me, because now I have different parts of me starting to merge that are completely unfamiliar with them, and now I have more memory and input to take into account.  I can't forget as much anymore, and I have no desire to.  People are still relating to me as if things are the same as they ever were, and when I go to therapy it feels as if we are the only two people in the world who know it is not.

Entering the Dating Scene as a Multiple

     So today might be kind of a group effort, and it seems like a good time to write about the topic dating.  It's bound to be a curious subject with multiple personalities, for various reasons.  The most obvious is having different genders inside the same body, orientations, not mention age, and plain and simple different interests.  Most multiples I've heard of discovered they were a multiple after being married, and a few well into a serious dating relationship.  I can only profess strong gratitude that none of us have woken up in bed lying next to a stranger who claims to be our spouse.  Or woken up at different times, each with a different stranger who claims we have taken them home (in any sense of the phrase).  I am quite thankful to have discovered DID and having a chance to come to terms with it before making a conscious decision to enter that exciting strange world that is dating.
     Because we have multiple genders and preferences, I simply choose the label bi-sexual to make things easier for everyone.  For the sake of everyone, I started online dating, so I can choose when to talk or not to talk.  It is only there for those who choose to, no one is obligated to continue someone else's conversation, and we encourage that if they do they do so very respectfully.  Children do not date, and are not allowed on site or to be kept there by anyone else as a secondary present alter.  Young teens can talk and flirt a bit, but are monitored for any adult situations and generally are not that interested there anyway- preteen magazines and 17 magazine rock.  Some are very sentimental, love story types.  Some are players.  Some are completely bored out of their minds (need I re-iterate again that ALONE is GOOD!?  'Hey baby'= yawn).  While it is difficult to be completely aware and monitor for rules, it is generally encouraged that no one consciously or unconsciously sabotage anther's relationship (aHEM.  ok so not everyone encourages or listens to that.  but some of us do.  hopefully.  pleadingly).
     Where multiple alters are present in dealing with a person, or when they trade off, it is best to be very cautious to avoid having anyone else get hurt or in trouble.  Yes I have alters who are fragile and easily have their feelings hurt but I also have alters who would love to go break legs for hurting them.  FYI all jerks in the world, do not deal with a multiple.  You will be surprised.  Badly.  Being labeled as bi-sexual seems to give people ideas of exotic or wild thrills.  Some alters are delighted to have an edgy luring reputation and some are decidedly not.  Our male alters are straight and not at all comfortable getting hit on by other men.  Exchanging jokes and talks over building things yes, flirting, uh, no.
     I guess the rules of dating for a multiple are the same that apply to anyone else.  Be cautious, be safe, be respectful, have fun.   (hmph, not much fun there, all cautious and safety, fun is wild, impulsive, maybe dangerous....hehe.  hhehehehe)

Buried

     There are some things you don't talk about.  I assumed by high school that everyone had some particularly nasty secret that they kept from everyone at all costs, I thought perhaps that was just a normal way of life.  One type of abuse that I find particularly hard to talk about, to admit to having experienced, is abuse involving preventing, distorting, or forcefully controlling bodily functions of a young child.  Usually done by a parent or caretaker, this type of abuse usually involves things like telling a child he or she may not use the bathroom for hours and beating them when they finally wet themselves, giving unnecessary and often frequent enemas, or inserting objects or tubes into the anus or genitalia for sexual or sadistic enjoyment.  This interference with bodily function is not limited to elimination, some children in extreme circumstances may be forced to eat things other than food, such as chemicals or excrement, either through forced feeding or with tubes stuck down the throat.
     I have not found many references to this subject.  Maybe because I have not really wanted to look, or maybe because everyone else who knows about it is committed to silence.  The few times I have heard mention of it, in tiny whispers in shadowed corners of human interaction, I have been relieved to know I was not the only one and at the same time, overriding that, the need to squash that subject, that knowledge, that reality, out of existence in my life.  That subject is beyond triggering, and the mental scars run just as deep as the physical scars many victims of this type of abuse have.
     I refuse to pretend this has not happened.  I refuse to forget, I refuse to keep it silent, I refuse not to heal, and I refuse to accept any of the shame that belongs to perpetrators of such crimes but never those it is inflicted on.  This has happened to me, and I am still alive and I have not given up.  The whole point of torture is to break a person, and I am not broken.