Adding Blogroll to Website

I have added a blogroll to my website. To date, I have only provided links to a couple of blogs that are resources for child abuse survivors rather than tracking individual stories: Forbidden Topic What About When MOM is the Abuser I have become aware of many good blogs written by child abuse survivors, such [...]

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Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): Integrating the Original Child

On my blog entry Survey for Child Abuse Survivors with More Than One Diagnosis, a reader posted the following question: I have been officially diagnosed with D.I.D. Currently we are integrating, sometimes at an alarming rate. There is a question though…how can we integrate with the core when the core has been sleeping and protected [...]

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Naming Alter Parts to Heal from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

I received a question from a reader about healing from dissociative identity disorder (DID). She is reading a book about healing from DID, and that author recommends naming each alter part and holding “meetings” with the different alter parts to get them to work together. The reader asked if I agreed with this advice. Before [...]

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Good Resource for Understanding DID and Dissociation

Over on my professional blog, I write about how trauma affects children on Trauma Tuesdays and Trauma Thursdays. I write this blog for people whose lives are touched by adoption. Most of the people who read my trauma articles are either foster parents or adoptive parents who are parenting children who have suffered from trauma, [...]

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Ritual Abuse and Numerology

One of the questions I have been asked a lot about ritual abuse is if certain numbers trigger me. The answer is yes, and this is true for most ritual abuse survivors. When I was brought into the cult, I was assigned a number as a name. My sister was assigned the next number. I [...]

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Basics about Ritual Abuse

I have not written that much about ritual abuse on my blog. This is because ritual abuse is the most difficult form of abuse for me to talk about. It really puts it in perspective when I feel more comfortable talking about mother-daughter sexual abuse than I do about ritual abuse. Why is it so [...]

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Masturbation as a Form of Self-Injury after Sexual Child Abuse

Today I am going to talk about a very difficult topic that affects many survivors of severe child abuse, particularly those who experienced severe sexual abuse and/or ritual abuse. The topic is using masturbation as a form of self-injury. People who self-injure with masturbation tend to be women who use objects that cut, burn, or [...]

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Dealing with the Unbelievable in Ritual Abuse

A fellow ritual abuse survivor contacted me with questions about “unbelievable” ritual abuse that she suffered. She was having a hard time believing that the ritual abuse happened because, from a logical standpoint, it did not seem possible. Chrystine Oksana’s book, Safe Passage to Healing, calls this phenomenon “The Real Unreal” and “The Unreal Real.” What [...]

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Issues with Consensual Sexual Relationships after Child Abuse

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that the reader who asked about challenges after integration also wanted me to address issues with sex. As I stated in that blog entry, I believe that healing from child abuse and healing from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) are two different process. I believe that this woman’s issues [...]

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Challenges after Integration from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

A reader asked me to talk about the challenges after integration from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). As she pointed out in her email, many people who are healing from DID see integration as the end goal, but really integration is only the beginning. Interacting with the world as an integrated person is very different from [...]

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