On my blog entry entitled How to Move Past Betrayal by a Mother Figure, a reader posted the following question:
Question: Are you able to create an alter part as an adult? I’ve never been diagnosed as DID, only have severe PTSD….am I able to create an alter “good mother” part to help comfort me when in need? Or is it simply a visualization technique? ~ AllyValentino
I can only speak for myself – I started creating alter parts when I was very young, and I have always held onto the ability to do so. So, yes, I do have the ability today to create an alter part if I feel that I need one. This is not something I choose to do very often, but it was incredibly healing for me to create a “good mother” alter part at the time that I did. I used that alter part in ways to meet my needs.
I would visualize her rocking my frightened parts when I was triggered. I would practice making eye contact with her as she said the words, “I love you,” to me. I still cannot do that with anyone in real life, but I find “receiving” love that way to be incredibly powerful and healing. When I have insomnia, I will visualize the “good mother” sitting next to my bed or outside my door with a shotgun in hand. I trust that she will keep me safe (even though I know she is just an alter part) and am able to sleep.
My guess is that anyone could do similar visualizations and potentially reap some benefits, although I cannot speak for anyone else since my experience is different. I have used visualization in powerful ways without creating alter parts, such as visualizing sitting in a chair across from my deceased father and telling him the things that I needed him to hear. There were no alter parts involved, but the visualization helped me achieved much-needed closure. For this reason, I am hopeful that doing a similar visualization could be healing for some of you who do not have alter parts.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Faith…
If this is a stupid reply, I’m really sorry…I”m just…I don’t…the post made me wonder about this …
I can see how what you said would help…and in fact…I can’t even think in words or linearly without separating my inside into two parts and have them talk to each other. I know I still switch and all that etc, sometimes.
Regarding for the deliberate creation of an altar part for comfort etc…is it possible for a person to end up “crazy” by doing that, instead of being healed?
I’m wondering in part because as a child, in the extreme loneliness and pain, I made up several imaginary friends (not the same as creating a split and altar, but just wondering)…and these imaginary friends seemed to somehow take up a life of their own and I felt like I was going crazy. It took a few years for me to wean myself off then back then…
Hi, Lilo.
I don’t know the answer to your question whether that **could** happen or not. For me, I only created alter parts for positive reasons. Even those that were ultimately manipulated by my abusers still came into being to protect the inner child.
- Faith
Lilo,
You don’t sound crazy to me…. Maybe you could look at it in terms of adaptiveness.. Is the splitting helping, or are you using it as an unhealthy defense, running away from something, etc. You sound pretty I sightful and I would bet that you are aware of what’s healthy for you and whats not in terms of your choices.
This post is very timely and helpful to me. I am going through an imcredi ly painful and complicated phased in my healing. It has to do with early attachment (or lack of) and it gets to the core of my being, even before the abuse stArted. I feel a shifting among parts internally and perhaps there is a mother- like part emerging. There is a new, comforting presence now and while I don’t remember “creating” it, it has become active in the wake of what has been a wrenching time in therapy and in life. Reading this post I think I will try to acknowledge and encourage this part as it has been a safe and healing presence… The opposite of “crazy”…
Thankss for sharing.
Blue
Thank you Faith for elaborating on the subject. I will work on the visualization technique. I think it could be quite comforting and healing.
I too find using visualizations to be very helpful- for getting comfort from the caring parts but also for helping me to love and accept (and integrate?) the darker parts. In her book ‘The Dark Side of the Light Chasers’ Debbie Ford describes a couple of visualization techniques that I have used a lot. In one you visualize your best self, receive comfort, and then go out and find some of the parts you’ve rejected and get this best self to help comfort them (this is a very simplified description, and maybe inaccurate since it’s been a while since I read it and I keep modifying the techniques as I go). In the other you meet up with rejected parts of yourself and find out what they have to teach you, what their beneficial side is etc. I’ve always thought that being able to personify feelings into a character is a good way to access them and understand them (I’ve gained some amazing insights that I wouldn’t have gotten through ‘thinking’).
As for making you crazy… When I write in my journal there is always a lot of ‘we’ and ‘her’ and ‘me’ and ‘you’ (all referring to me; and I don’t have DID). I did at times wonder if maybe this was a bit crazy… but mostly it just seems convenient- a usefool tool. I do some dream analysis as part of my therapy and we (me and T) often look at the characters in my dreams as different aspects of myself. So maybe it’s just this really cool thing that our brains are able to do. For me having ‘other parts’ only feels unhealthy when I do it without awareness- like having arguments with ‘other people’ in my head (that does sound crazy… maybe I should explain)- this is something I seem to do when I’m out of balance or stressed in some way- it’s like I’m imagining/anticipating a conversation with someone in my life and I run through it in my head and they are usually criticizing me and I get quite agitated. Sometimes I wonder how much different that is from the people I hear having arguments out loud with other people who aren’t there. But I’m not sure that being crazy is something you either are or aren’t. Is it more of a continuum? I like to believe we can go a little bit toward the crazy end and still come back toward the sane side. When I was first struggling with accepting the truth about my abuse I did feel crazy at times (and I hid this part from the people around me- including therapist- because I was afraid of getting that label and not coming back from there). What am I trying to say? Maybe that having ‘parts’ is just something normal about being human- and we all do it to different degrees and in different ways?
Christine,
Your post describes so eloquently the experience of inner healing- whether you have “parts” or not. Your idea of the Best Self is powerful and will be in my thoughts as I continue working with the difficult and painful parts of my experience. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You are inspiring! -Blue
This is an interesting topic. I never deliberately tried to create alterrs, but did create one as an adult. She is a sort of inner self helper (so everyone assumes she was the first to be created, while she was the last) and carer for the system. I didn’t try visualization or anything, and at the time of the creation I didn’t realize she had a role in healing. Now I do realize this.
[...] of Blooming Lotus discusses the question of whether an adult can create an alter to help them with healing. There are several layers to this topic that I find interesting in the [...]
I have a couple a comment than an incredibly stupid sounding question. I will address them separately.
Here is the comment. There is a lot of inner healing type of work that can be done for yourself, or I have done it with other people. Some of it is a sort of comforting visualization that may include someone new that you bring into the situation to be a nurturing figure. Sometimes this can be a religious figure if that is something meaningful to the person in a positive way.
There is another type of inner healing I have worked with though that is considered a healing of memories. It is an issues of going back into a memory that was painful or even traumatic, but allowing something new to be introduced. Sometimes an aspect is revealed to me that lets me “know” or “see” something I didn’t understand before and it brings healing. Others, time a completely new scene unfolds, and that memory sort of “replaces” the other- the original. It isn’t like I can’t remember the original, but it doesn’t seem very real. The one that seems real is the new one. The example that I can give is of all the pain that existed around my father’s death. I was only 13 years old at the time. It was not only all the sense of unreality around it (which is a level of dissociation that most of us experience around times of trauma), but the years of guilt I help afterward that I had been an ungrateful child who didn’t understand how ill my father was. His death happened over a Christmas/New Years time, and all I could think about while he was still living was having him put together some of my Christmas gifts for me. I had no idea he would be dead in a few days. That led to years of guilt, and also fears that he never knew how much I loved him. This haunted for for years. When I finally learned about these methods of inner healing (when I was in my 20′s), I went into a relaxed state where I could let creative imagination and God do their work. In the scene that was created, I was at the funeral home viewing the body of my father- with all the other people around doing the things people usually do at funeral homes (this is part of what really happened). But the new parts that got added were that everyone else at the funeral home sort of “froze in place.” My dad woke up and was not dead anymore. He and I went out to a park and played on the swings and talked, and I was able to tell him how much I loved him, etc.
That is still my memory, and it is though it happened. My cognitive mind knows it didn’t, but the reality of my experience says that it did. I’ve never had that sense of being overwhelmed by guilt and uncertainty regarding the relationship with my dad since then.
According to the things that I was reading back then when I was learning about these things, it has something to do with two memories not being able to exist in the same place.
Anyway that is my comment regarding the idea of being able to create alternate realities for ones self that are healing.
I will begin a separate reply to go into my weird question.
Faith- and any others who have responses- This whole line of thought is even scary for me to introduce. Most of you are in different places than I am, and it may just sound foreign to you, or you may think I am crazy.
First of all when I have had people answer whether someone can create alters as an adult my response is always that one needs to have developed that ability at a very young age when dissociation is still the main way of coping. I tended not to believe that someone could suddenly just start doing this as an adult. But I have wondered.
I generally wonder this when life is so painful for me that I wish there was another part of me that could take over for awhile. My reality is that I was so well protected as a child and was always taken care of. I never had to learn about coping mechanisms because there was always someone there to “fix” situations for me. So by the time teenage years and adulthood came around I was in for a rude awakening. There is a lot of pain out there that no one can fix, and I wasn’t prepared. Life has often been very painful to me because of this. My traumatization has been as an adult because I have had no where to go, and just don’t know what to do with pain. So I do wonder if there is a way for someone like me who has never been multiple to create a functional alter for when I am not. I guess that is the basic question I am asking- which I am sure must seem very odd to all of you who are trying to figure out how to not be multiple.
The second part of this is something I have trouble verbalizing. I’ve worked with people with DID closely. In one case very closely. She would tell me that she experienced me as being a part of her much in the ways that her alters were. I would experience her world to be very familiar and “normal.” We seemed to relate best in the “space between identities.” I experienced it as all very spiritual.
Just over the past couple days I have had some odd sense of being pulled into that space again. It was during that extended dialogue between Michale and I in a previous blog, and some of the others who commented along the way. It was a space that felt very familiar to me. It was a very light place of floating where one could go this way or that way or could go no where at all. I related to the person who talked about the birds who would fly into him as though there was a part of him that was “not there.” I know a similar place of “not being.” I felt so drawn into the conversation that day that I have stayed in somewhat of a space of “not being” or being “between things” since. Words have been hard to use because they don’t really exist in the space I keep finding myself. I have avoided phone calls, or contact with people because I wasn’t sure I could “be there.” Even my typing now is odd because I am not sure it is my fingers that are actually touching the keyboard. This has all been very non-functional for me though because while I am “not being”- no one else is either. So I think I have basically been sleeping- except for brief types of having to go to the bathroom. I am trying to pull myself out of this place now because I have to function. But this adds to my wondering about whether I could find or create someone within who could function when I can’t.
I’m sorry for how weird all of this sounds.
Hi, Elaine.
From what I have read, a person cannot learn how to split into alter parts, etc., after ~ age 6. If you haven’t learned it by then, you won’t. In support of this opinion is the experience of numerous POWs, who endure ongoing trauma severe enough to caused DID in young children but does not result in DID in adults.
Can I say definitively that it is impossible? No. All I know is my own experience. I learned how to do it as a young child, and I retain the ability to do it today.
Have you ever considered the possibility that you did learn how to do it as a young child? It would be possible to endure a series of traumas, learn how to split, be removed into safety, and spontaneously (subconsciously) return to being a “singleton.” Theoretically, this child could retain the ability to split and turn to it in times of feeling unsafe.
Just a theory … no idea if could be true or not.
- Faith
Faith,
Your post reminded me that i once told my T that I had an instinct that i would not have survived what I went through as a child if it had been inflicted on me as an adult.
The T agreed to the extent he said I would not have survived as well as I have because i would have lacked the ability to dissociate.
Hi Faith,
Perhaps you know something none of my therapists have come across, or not explained.
Have you read anything about what might happen to a child who is past age 6, and everything has been fine. Then at age 10 – I am talking about me, in case you don’t guess – father falls asleep at the wheel on a family vacation, car runs off the road, mother is thrown out the doors, maybe she screamed as she woke up while this happened, she lands on the ground outside the car, unconscious and severely brain damaged, and dies later that day. Her oldest – we were 10, 9 and 7 – was the only one awake at the time. Everyone was injured and went to the hospital. They say I almost died, but I really don’t feel that is true. But to make a long life story more concise, just recently, decades after the event, did I realize that mine was not the “normal” childhood I thought I had had. I feel that I came as close to dissociating as could have been possible, but I am sure I didn’t. But something got pushed down way deep where I did not access it until recently, and then the s#@$ hit the fan.
My question – is there a gradient of dissociation depending on your development stage in childhood? Do you know of a good book that could explain this?
Hi, Freasha1964.
I suggest the book “The Myth of Sanity” by Dr. Martha Stout. That’s the best book I have found the explores the continuum of dissociation specifically. :0)
- Faith
Thanks so much Faith,
I have reserved Myth of Sanity at my local library.
Freasha
“I related to the person who talked about the birds who would fly into him as though there was a part of him that was “not there.””
Hi Elaine
I just wanted to reply to what you said above as it was me who talked about the birds flying into me.
It is easier to feel ‘not there’ than experience seemingly overwhelming bad emotions, however true solidarity in my case with other survivors has always been about knowing each other is ‘there’, just in terrible pain, despite the feeling of absence which is a defence mechanism of the most powerful sort as you may know from your work.
I also wanted to comment on your post above that one, where you talk about positive visualisations replacing negative realities. I think this can be really helpful but I have reservations too. For me I needed recognition and acknowledgement of the reality as it was, as bad as it was, first and foremost. I am still undergoing that recognition and acknowledgement process. That’s because I grew up in a family that tried to look sweet and perfect and cover up all the badness. There is no point for me undergoing hypnosis or any kind of therapy or visualisation which made it feel or seem better than it was, before I have fully recognised and acknowledged just how bad it was as only with that recognition comes healing. Otherwise it’s just more make-believe.
I think Faith wrote on here about a dream where she was back in the place where she was abused but this time there were hatches or windows from which she could escape. That to me shows she is healing as she no longer experiences herself as powerless in the dream, but to heal first I bet she needed to acknowledge just how powerless to escape she was. After that could come self-help by way of visualisation.
Everyone’s healing journey is different and we all have different levels of defences but it is interesting you were touched by my story of the birds flying into me.
Interesting topic. We’re trying to create an inner good mother, but think for us it’s more a case of “me” learning to be a good mother to the younger members of our system. Understand why you’d make a new part to fulfil that role, just not really sure how to do it, I’m ok with learning to take on that role, so for us, that’s ok.
Also think it’s possible to create new parts in response to adult trauma, though think it probably wouldn’t be a conscious decision. After a recent adult trauma that had some things in common with past abuse I wondered if another part had been created. Still not sure, but beginning to think it’s more likely that it was member(s) I don’t know about coming through to take what happened. Think it could happen though.
But other than to create a helper part or to survive the unbearable, not sure why you’d want to create more parts. Think the only way to really heal is to accept everything that happened and really feel the emotions connected to it, and re-associate all our dissociated parts, either through integration or through developing co-consciousness, making new parts would run contrary to that, I think.
Ax- I agree with you that there is an order to things. It doesn’t make sense to try to change awful memories when you haven’t come yet to a place of acknowledging them or experiencing them, or having others let you accept your own experience. Part of my launching into that part of my response was to the person who started out asking about ways to find nurturing and healing that she had never had the chance to receive in real life. I think in a previous response I made to that person in a previous blog that it seems most appropriate to grieve what she did not have. That fits in with trying to get to the place of accepting the bad things that happened, and the good things that didn’t happen. But after that there is time for healing by creating “alternate realities.”
As far as my weird state of consciousness lately. I am depressed. There are lot of things in life that have not been going well, and yet I am still required to function. I don’t always do that very well. I minimize my people contact when I an struggling. It didn’t used to be this way. I had really felt completely healed for many years now. But something happened over a year ago now, that led me to feel that nothing was as it seemed, and to doubt my own beliefs and perceptions. I have still been trying to crawl back from that. I tend to feel emotional pain very acutely, which really ticks me off because I see so many people that are somehow able to just take it in stride. Over the past couple days I have felt very disconnected from myself though. It wasn’t quite like the old days when I always felt behind myself somewhere (as a defense), and not quite present in my own life. I have been very connected and present in my life for some years now. What I have been feeling lately is like a very loose connection to my own body and that I could just float out of it at any minute if I chose to. I guess part of my sharing this was wondering if there was anyway i could use that to help myself. Most of you have found functional ways to dissociate. I’m trying to learn if there can be something functional I can do to help me get through hard things. Right now when I get this way- and don’t feel really present in my body, there is no one to do the things that need to be done. I have spent enough time around people with DID to know the nice surprise of them “coming back” and finding out “someone else” had taken care of some tasks for them.
See I know that most of you have experienced dissociation due to trauma. But I have always speculated that just the ability to develop alters and become a functional team, might be hinting at some untapped ability we all have to use our brains in ways we standardly do not. Obviously the idea isn’t to create trauma to have this happen, but I’ve wondered about other ways to allow the mind to evolve.
Of course all this thinking was in response to the question posed of whether adults can create alters.
Hi Elaine
As you know from your feelings of spaciness/ not being there/ not typing these words on the keyboard, these times are associated with a decreased level of functionality for you.
That’s my experience of dissociation too. Whilst it was a method of self-preservation during trauma and stress, it now becomes an impediment to functioning and therefore needs healing.
For me it’s value was a way to survive the otherwise unsurvivable, but the shattering of the ego now needs healing, it is something broken not something to aspire to.
Others may disagree. Talking about consciously creating ‘other parts’ e.g. mothering parts in adulthood is quite different for me than the choice-less fragmentation of the soul to get away from trauma in the original events.
Hope that makes some sense!
I didn’t think it was probably possible to learn to create an alter as an adult, if I had never done so before. My thinking about this was not some academic exercise. I lived close enough to the world of multiples that it “makes sense” to me- and it really has led me to wonder about the capacity of the human brain to develop in new ways- not because of trauma- but perhaps it is another step in evolution. I agree that seeking to split because of trauma would be absurd, and of course when the splitting has been caused by trauma I know it creates all kinds of difficult situations in spite of the fact it is a gift because all that trauma lies underneath- unknown. But it does lead me to think about the potentialities of what the brain can do.
My current distress is due to a couple of situations in life on which there is just no change and they feel increasingly difficult to endure. I want to escape. But for me escape is non-stop sleeping in which all kinds of other stuff doesn’t get done. After the past few days of feeling so disconnected, I started wondering if I “could do something with that” in away that would let me rest, but also let me function. I know it must seem odd.
As far as whether I ever experienced that kind of trauma at a young age- I really don’t think so. I can’t imagine what it would have been. I get very frustrated with myself my life growing up was good. In fact it was so good, I didn’t want to grow up. I wanted to stay home where I was safe and taken care of. This was a longing well into my adulthood, and sometimes still is. As I have contemplated to myself why I have such a hard time dealing with life situations, I came to the conclusion that I never had to “cope” with anything growing up, so I never developed coping mechanisms. And of course since I didn’t have early trauma I didn’t get dissociation either. Although I had grown and changed enough so that not every hurtful thing in the world had huge effects on me, when something big enough hits hard- something big enough to shake my entire world view and belief system- I don’t seem to have the coping mechanisms to deal with it. The feeling for me is like I have fallen into a deep dark pit, and have gotten to the point of realizing that no one is coming to help. Were this an actual situation, I would know there was at least escape through immanent death, but in my situation there is no immanent death- so there is no escape.
The pressures to function add to the need to escape. Since I have still not found work to support myself with, my mom basically has to support me, so she grouches as me about money a lot. If I show that I am depressed, she tells me to snap out of it, or calls me a “spoiled bratt.” They she tells me everything would be OK if I just had enough faith. That when I believe right then God will finally do something. So I feel I am held captive in that I can’t run away because I can’t pay my bills without her, but I also have to endure all of her lack of understanding about how she and I are wired differently. This actually would be the one major type of traumatization I had as a child. I have a wonderful mother. I admire her greatly, but we are very different. Her lack of understanding of me was always invalidating. And although I understand the cultural contextuality at this point in my life, she has spent most of my life using terms that made sense to her- but not to me. Any time I was different than her expectations, I would hear how “ashamed” she was of me. She would often threaten to disown me. I was really a good kid, but her way of expressing herself was unhealthy for me. I remember one time I wanted to surprise her and clean the house for her, and I waxed the kitchen floor for her while she was gone. She came home and was furious (because it was a no-wax floor), and told me she was ashamed of me, and how dare I pull a “trick like that”. There are no emotions when I say that because I have healed from that kind of stuff a long time ago, but that is just to give you an example. It wasn’t until I was an adult and she started doing that to my kids that I confronted her about those kinds of things. We had some rough years then, but she seemed to be able to break the habit, and we get a long well these days. It was always easy growing up to think my dad would have understood me better- because he too was more emotional like me- but since he died at an early age, I don’t really know that. It is just easy to think that the “missing” parent would have been the one to understand. I mean that stuff is healed in me now. I had years and years of therapy, but that is the only kind of trauma I can think from my childhood. I mean there is other stuff I have been told about that I would think could be traumatic to a child, but I don’t remember it, and it is NOTHING like what you have all gone through.
Hi Elaine,
I read recently an interesting definition of abuse in childhood…..it was actually profound.
“Anything less than nurturing is abuse”
Ax- see I can dissociate- but no one else moves forward. I just end up with “nobody home,” which isn’t very functional. I’m really not a DID wannabe. I was just trying to figure out new ways to cope.
Maybe a dumb question, but the dissociation and the creation of alter parts seem to be two different process. Anyone can and does dissociate to one degree or another. I can and have dissociated all the way out in terms of my awareness just being gone. What happens next that allows some people to create alter parts so they have another part that is conscious?
Hi, Elaine.
This is not a “dumb” question, but I also don’t know the answer. Being able to create alter parts comes as naturally to me as breathing. It is just something I do.
- Faith
That’s neat, Faith, I have exactly the same kind of ‘inner mother’ and interact with her similarly, who I consciously created, although I never thought of as an alter part, but you’re right it is similar. She’s not an internalization of my birth mother, just my own compassion, wisdom and ability to love. I think she is in some ways an internalization of the love I receive from my higher power/faith.
I have an automatic reaction related to my inner mother, when I am feeling shame, I have an automatic voice in my head that says ” I love you SDW” which I got by telling myself that whenever I felt shame. Now it happens automatically.
I think creating and being our own inner good mother is a very healing thing to do, probably one of the most helpful. I don’t meet the diagnostic criteria for DID (although I’m probably somewhere on the continuum), so I don’t think that’s a requirement.
SDW
I have still be thinking about this subject. I use the word “thinking” intentionally because they do seem to be thoughts. When I talk about my experience, I usually understand it as “sensing” followed by description. In talking about whether adults can still form alter parts (if they never learned how to as a child), there might be a reason for why it doesn’t tend to happen that is based on brain science. Babies and young children are born with many more neural pathways, than they have as older children. By later in childhood the brain starts “pruning” those neural pathways, and getting rid of those that are not needed. Once science realized that that is when people got into trying to parent babies and children in much more “stimulative” ways so that they don’t “lose” so many neural pathways, and therefore lose all that potentiality.
Without that pathways get pruned down to reflect what is actually being used. Truly a situation of “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” So it would make sense that there would be abilities available to young children going through trauma that are not available at a later age unless they have been developed- and therefor the neural pathways didn’t get pruned back.
I don’t suspect that these extra neural pathways exist just for the process of managing trauma, but are there for development in whatever needs present themselves.
I think the brain is amazing. We all know about how the stories of people with brain trauma or illness who have to have parts of the brain removed, and new neural pathways are formed to restore functioning. I guess I think our brains have the capacity to do things we haven’t even dreamed of.
I once watched while a person with DID went through a spontaneous process of having her brain “rewired.” That is more complicated than I can explain, and I certainly can’t explain it from her perspective, but it was a miraculous “weaving” together of all the pieces among soft inner music. That is the part she did describe to me.
Hi, Elaine.
Interesting topic! My son has recently been diagnosed with dyslexia. I have been told that the cause is a lack of pruning of neural connectors in his brain in utero. As a result, he has gifts that others don’t have (such as being able to see outside the box and view issues in very different ways), but it comes at the cost of slow processing, including memory retrieval, because his brain’s wiring is less efficient than an average person’s brain. Very interesting!
- Faith
This is indeed a fascinating explanation. Pruning that didn’t happen. It feeds back to something Michael wrote a while back. That he never had a moment where he split, but just never went through the process of integration, because we are all born split.(Wildly paraphrasing and I hope I got the gist right.) I wonder if much research is being done on this.
This is a trend I have observed more and more in science lately. That something that has been considered “wrong” or excess baggage that just gets carried along ( such as “junk DNA”) has a function that was overlooked and is actually an asset in ways that have gone unappreciated.
I only want to confirm that what Elaine says -with some variations- is also what my therapist has explained to me about neural pathways etc. (it has been and still is an important element/theme in my therapy and a big help to me to understand and help myself better).
It’s as Freasha summarizes more or less in her reference to Michael’s words. All people are being born with different parts that initially not cling together. They are initially different and non-integrated but aren’t experienced as being other than pertaining to the self(contrary to people with DID’s experience).
People with DID never were able to fulfill the normal process of integration people usually go trough in the various years after birth. (This happens in various degrees, I myself experience this not being integrated pretty intensely not only in the existence of my alter parts but even more so in the lack of being a real completely formed personality myself – a lot is missing and/or dispersed)
Neural connections that normally woud have been made, aren’t made because of traumatic events that occured repeatedly (If I’m not mistaken DID does (almost) never occur with traumatic events that happen only once. A neural pattern forms and fixes itself most often by repetition: by triggering the same neural response in a person again and again – this is also how habits and automatisms in people are formed).
When traumatic events happen again and again it is possible that extra-ordinary connections are being made and that the normal integration/cohesion of ‘the separate self-parts’ is prohibited.
And yes, there are at the very least-I believe, Anglo-Saxon- studies done on this subject. They might be related to the relatively new but highely interesting field of energy psychology (with which my therapist is familiar). But it’s not at all the mainstream point of view of DID. Here on the blog is the first time I saw this (in my experience logical) alternative explanation being made. Things are changing. That’s nice.
Correction in my comment above: the studies have to do with a psycho-neuro-biological basis of Dissociative Identity disorder and with neural integration and less (not NOT) with energy psychology.
Well, I don’t want to start leading people out into left field, because it really is about balance. None of us need what we already have too much of. But I think everything in developmental psychology supports the idea of identity development and the sense of self as something we are not born with- but something that happens as we develop. Many types of spirituality- especially of an eastern nature focus on us as not being a defined “ego state” from the beginning, but developing an ego state as becoming a functioning entity in the world. Eastern philosophy/mysticism cautions us not to get too attached to our sense of who we are from an ego perspective because we become too limited and in a way to brittle (easily breakable). Dutch philosopher/theologian, Soren Kierkegaard also said “Once you label me you negate me”- the idea being that once you define yourself in absolute terms that you limit yourself from everything else you can be.
Ok, this is what I am actually getting around to… this issue of sense of self in related to a sense of being dispersed or dissociative was the focus of my doctoral work. It was the focus of my doctoral work because it is my reality. The dissertation was not trying to make a case of that we should all be dispersed and dissociated, but instead was trying to explore it as a natural state of being (rather than pathology). But like I said, it is all about balance. It could be really cool/ satisfying in some way to exist in this dispersed state. It certainly can help open one to spiritual realities that seem to abstract for others, but at the same time, we do not just live in a spiritual or “disembodied” world. We showed up in a body. We are incarnate. Now for some people, including many of you that probably seemed like the worse things that could have happened to you because so much abuse happened to your bodies- but that was something that someone else did. It technically has nothing to do with you (in terms of defining you)- but it did effect you. But the fact that we all live in bodies, and in a more or less concrete world, we have to figure out how to function in that world, and staying in a dispersed or dissociated state sometimes makes that difficult. So in the academic work that I did (based on intuitive internal sensing), was to explore the need for a balanced perspective of what we are. If we limit ourselves to a particular entrenched ego state we limit ourselves. If we don’t accept our incarnation in a relatively concrete world, we have trouble functioning within it and among others. So the idea is to accept the full range of what and who we are.
For me, in doing this work, I was seeking to find validation for how I experienced myself (dispersed and partially dissociated) but to look toward a more full picture of the potentialities of being.
I did not learn about issues to do with brain science and neural pathways and connections until after I had finished my doctorate, but when I did learn about those things it helped to reinforce to myself the biological base of “becoming.” My particular belief at this point is that part of how we develop at the level of selfhood is environmental. We are not just “born” a certain way. I tend to think whether we end up multiple of singular, or with little sense of self at all, it is because our environments led our psychology- which includes brain structure and function in a particular way. If there is any truth to that statement, then it would mean that people who were multiple were not necessarily “shattered” into pieces, but developed into parts. I am not the best one to answer that. Those of you who are multiple will best have to see how that resonates with your experience. In would help to remove that sense of “pathology” from how you think about yourselves. At the same time it does not speak to what allows increased functionality in this world- does that include having a more cohesive sense of self, or cooperative sense of selves???? My question and my life has been a bit different. I simply “was not.” Being dispersed was my reality, and I had very little sense of when “I” meant for me. It was fine for my subjective experiences, but it did not work well for my functioning in the world and among others. I had to learn how to become an “I”. Sometimes it feels like a rather stable “I,” but it can lose much sense of cohesion, which is where I am right now. For me this happens during times of new or triggered trauma. I did not really think in terms of myself having significant trauma- not like most of you. But as I explore and examine I realize there were a lot of things even from a young age- not abuse really, but medical procedures, emotional traumas, etc. I did not develop into “many,” I just didn’t develop into “any.” I have often teased with my DID clients that somehow they ended up with many personalities and I didn’t even get one.
I have had to try to build one, but I also know it is a construct that sometimes looses its cohesion. What does that mean for me in terms of brain science? I really don’t know. Did things get too pruned back, not pruned back enough???? I have to focus instead on the healing potential of the brain and the building and restoring of neural pathways for me, because I really do not know what happened at that level developmentally for me.
[...] 28, 2011 by faithallen On my blog entry entitled Can an Adult Create an Alter Part?, a reader posted the following comment: But other than to create a helper part or to survive the [...]