On my blog entry entitled Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): Are Any Alter Parts “Bad”?, a reader posted the following comment:
It is the little girl that is the worst problem. I know this sounds terrible, because she is a little girl, but the sorrow and the fear are more than I can tolerate EVEN with the so-called ‘dark’ part available to help condemn the crime and not its little victim…Then when I crash, she escapes and makes my life a miserable hell, but I still cannot remember and nothing is resolved. The whole thing just keeps repeating and it’s finally driven me to drink. I’m not sure if things can ever change, but most of the time I am able to keep a hope that they might. I wish they could because I need that kid to keep from falling down and dying prematurely. She is the one who writes stories, takes the photographs… she even used to sing, but that has been many years ago now. She is the creativity that makes life worth living but I can’t have her here because sometimes she STABS me with her art. She makes horrors to torment me, yet I cannot remember. Sometimes this makes me dread her even though she’s just a kid. ~ Ethereal Highway
What Ethereal Highway is describe here is her repository of unmet needs. She experiences the unmet need as an alter part. Other child abuse survivors experience the unmet need in other ways. No matter how we experience it, unmet need is very tough to work through.
The problem is that we, as abused children, did not believe that we were allowed to need. Our need made us vulnerable, and we hated ourselves for having needs — even basic needs that we would never begrudge our children for having, such as the need for love, safety, security, or food.
To this day, I hate to feel needy. My loathing of needing anyone or anything actually stands in the way of my healing process at times because I choose to stay “sick” in some areas of my life when the alternative is needing something from somebody else. Human beings were intended to be interdependent, so it is normal for me to need another person from time to time, and yet I resist feeling need with all that I have.
I have known people without dissociative identity disorder (DID) who have nearly been driven mad by the needy part inside. The book When You’re Ready by Kathy Evert and Inie Bijkerk provides an excellent example of this. The woman was sexually abused by her mother (among others). In order to survive, she split off the needy inner child and moved on with her life as an adult woman who had walled off the need into the inner little girl.
When the woman was ready to heal, the needy inner little girl would not go away, no matter how much the woman wanted her to. The little girl needed basic needs met, such as cuddling with a teddy bear and sucking her thumb. The intensity of the unmet needs overwhelmed the woman. The book chronicles her healing process as she accepted this need as “mine” and healed it.
The drinking is a way to keep the needs of the inner little girl separate. This cycle will not end until you are ready to embrace that need as yours and begin healing it. I strongly recommend reading the book When You’re Ready to help you with this. I recommended it to another online friend (who had not been sexually abused by her mother), and she found this book to be a very helpful resource in understanding herself.
Facing and embracing the need is very hard. I am fortunate in that I split off my unmet needs into many different parts. I cannot imagine the enormity of facing a deep reservoir of unmet need all stored in one place. You can heal this part of yourself, just as the woman in the book did.
Photo credit: Faith Allen
You so often seem to write the posts the very day I need them! I am SO struggling with this at the moment. I HATE that part of me (I don’t have DID, I just have very distinctive parts of me that hold different things/memories/feelings). The problem is that I never used to let that part out at all, I used to not let myself need anything. But then it started to grow, when for the first time I had people around me who started to meet some of that need. Now I swing between not letting myself need anyone, and almost feeling like I’m starving for care and comfort. And when I feel that needy, I feel so young. And I hate that. It feels a bad, disgusting thing that is not to be trusted, but is to be punished. I wish I could just not need it anymore. It ends up hurting me more, because that need can’t be met – well not 100% of the time, and right now not even 10% of the time. And then I punish myself for needing it and the vicious circle continues. I dont’ know how to manage this. Sometimes, like at the moment, it gets so bad I just want to kill her – that part. That pathetic, snivelling, cry baby. Wow, I can feel the hate towards her just as I even write this.
Thank you for your post – I’ll look at the book. I read a lot though and whilst it helps with the theory and the logical thought, it doesn’t seem to change the feelings.
Your post’s help and inspire me. I have read the book mentioned above as well, it took me probably 6-8 months to read because as i went on, i found various parts very difficult for me to read and comprehend as they reminded me of my own childhood.
I completed reading the book a couple of months ago and i wrote this in my own private blog(the quotations are from the book):
“to be a survivor, to my mind anyway, means more it was an experience one can pass through and recover from. It makes me think of Abraham Maslow and his question, ‘And what shall we think of the well-adjusted slave?’
I do not want to be a well-adjusted victim, and therefore i believe i need to participate in my own emotional emancipation. I need to choose to be free from the effects of the incest to the greatest possible extent i can achieve. I don’t mean i can suddenly ignore the impact of all this and just walk away from it as though i grew up in wonderland. I mean i can choose to allow it to have a minimum negative impact by facing it and moving on.
in short, i guess you scale it down to seize and deal with it the same way you have to face and cope with life’s other tragedies and wrong turns. you make it fit on to the list of all the other human potentials like love and war and suicide and tenderness.You have to allow other people and yourself to be human and to struggle to become what you can be, and more than we’ve all been”
“You did not ask for this item to be on your life’s agenda. and it’s not your fault you’re stuck with it. You deserve help and the time it takes to work this out.”
“Make the commitment to deal with it, completely, no matter what.
Get all the support and help you need.
Get a good hold on your never and stay with it. Take time. Easy does it.
Love yourself more than you ever have before. You need it.
Beyond that, life has it’s ups and downs, and somehow it goes on.
Don’t kill yourself. You deserve more than that.
There’s no big ending as near as i can tell. You move into a better, more comfortable and happy phase, and it lightens up if you hang with it.
Trust the process”
reading that book was difficult and hard. Every time i read it, it felt like i was the one in therapy, the one beating my head into the wall and floor, trying to make the images go away. After reading some days would just curl up, because all i could see in m mind was my own mother and what she did. And i would hear her voice, i would hear her say lets go on a trip, where you want to go, and i would get that same cold, sharp chill down my spine. The end of the book makes me feel hopeful. Maybe all this pain im suffering will finally end. or just lessen. it has lessened considerably, but there is a day, almost every week without a fail, where i can’t take it. something will happen, or i will be watching a movie, or talking to people in guild and something will be said that just triggers it. it’s like there is a door, that holds all the memories in my brain and whenever i am reminded of her or them, the switch gets flipped and the door opens in my brain and my mind is flooded with images of what happened to me.
but i know now that i’ll be ok.
Unmet needs is like the elephant in the room with most people I know, whether or not they acknowledge it, and whether or not they have been abused. It is huge for me personally too. Very huge.
It’s to the point where even children who are not intentionally abused are having this problem due to families being practically forced to maintain two or more incomes in order to survive. Add abuse and neglect to that, and you got real big problems, not only for individuals, but for all of us. Our mindset and what we are allowing to happen to us is insane. Just look at the rise in child violence and violence in school. These kids to bad things, but it is because they are in pain (due in large part, I’m guessing to a condition of chronic unmet needs… and limited options) then they act it out. They are literally showing us that “criminals” are not born criminals, they are created through severe abuse…. and it seems that we’re NOT getting the message! (I’m NOT saying that every abused child grows up and commits crimes, of course not; however, prisons are brimming with survivors, as well as mental institutions and hospitals and the streets.) Yep, you hit an artery Faith.
Sorry, I got off on a tangent! But it is something that disturbs me, children and unmet needs. Thanks for this post.
I will get the book.
Peace,
Mia
Faith, you are such a nice person. I just want to tell you that. Plus, I have an update coming soon at my place. What has happened in the last few days feels like nothing short of a miracle. And the desire to drink completely disappeared as soon as the events began to unfold. I’m a dry county again and I welcome it. I think right now I am still consolidating all of this… and I sit here and sigh because some things are difficult to put into words. To my knowledge, I have no prior experience quite like this one. I do – but not at this level of depth after I had abandoned hope and taken up residence in a dungeon. So I have never had occassion to attempt to describe anything like this to another person. For now, let’s suffice it to say that I am not so alone anymore with my needs and I feel stronger for that. Like maybe sometimes needs are not such an impossible thing and that there are at least a sprinkling, however sparse, of people in the world who can be with me in the way that I need.
Congrats EH!! We don’t know each other except on this site, but I know you’ve been struggling and I want you to know, I’m rooting for you! Have a great weekend. Mia