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 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. ~ Bay
A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with Bay 100% on this topic. However, I have more recently come to recognize that I can, in fact, use alter parts to help meet my needs in a very loving way that does not involve rejecting a part of myself.
I agree with Bay that the parts that have been separate since childhood are separate due to distancing myself from them – from their memories, emotions, etc. So, the foundation of those alter parts is based upon a form of self-rejection, which is ultimately unhealthy for me now that the abuse has ended. I need to love and accept each part as “me.” Loving them back into my core is a very loving and healing thing to do for myself.
However, the good mother alter part I discussed in this blog entry is not created out of self-rejection but out of self-love. There is not one part of myself that rejects her. I love her deeply, and her love for me is very much a reflection of the self-love that I have developed.
To use a metaphor to describe the difference, I see my core as a pond and the alter parts from childhood as pieces of ice that were frozen in time through self-rejection. I need to melt the ice through the warmth of self-love and invite them back into the pond. However, the good mother alter part that I created was not created through “freezing her out.” Instead, she was molded out of the warm water, perhaps like putting the water in a cup temporarily because the temporary separation is healing for me. She feels different, probably because I have never rejected her and she has never rejected me.
I am not sure if I am explaining this well. She just feels different. It’s like I have the gift of creating “forms” temporarily to help meet my own needs in a loving way, and it is very different from the “freezing out” method I used in childhood. The best part is that the good mother and other alter parts created in love are fluid and pour themselves back into the core whenever I don’t need them to be separate. Does that make sense?
Photo credit: Hekatekris
We create temporary parts to deal with the now. We started creating hosts at age 3 and can do the same thing now. The new host has no past and no future and therefore not responsibility. That is why it works for us.
Hosts were created in part consciously. What we would call alters are a result of physical not being able to form a whole due to the environment we were in. We did not leave alters away or distance ourselves from them any more than they left others away or distanced them selves from others.
My multiplicity is not an adult method or a result of cognitive thought as host are. A host can be developed to deal with things in the now.
It would not work to create a mother part for us as Charlotte already exists. As I write it seems the only way that creating a host now works is if there was no need for a host or alter before. That is why hosts were created in the first place.
The ones that can create a host are before age 3 so they are the ones that do it with information from the rest of us.
They way it works out is the host is out and about for a while and then with our our knowledge dissipates.
If one looks at the Stockholm Syndrome for an answer it would have to be considered that the adult who experiences that may have had trauma that they are not aware of. Same thing with the indoctrination of the military. Is the soldier a separate part and if so can it happen without childhood trauma.
All guess work as I have never been a soldier not kept captive for more than two weeks and never as and adult
It makes perfect sense to me. I love the analogy too.
It’s funny, I think we all have different sides to our personalities depending on the situation we’re in at any given time, except that they sides to not fracture, they are part of the whole in some way that we accentuate when we need to.
I heard a show on NPR yesterday about a famous singer who had to create another persona to go out on stage because she was naturally shy. She even had a name for her! Interesting. I think that perhaps many show biz types do this… I’ve always thought acting required a certain amount of acquiescence if the actor is really great. How could it not?
In any case, you do make sense Faith. As always.
Peace,
mia
I get what Bay is saying about creating new alters seems contrary to healing. For me, while I know that I created many, many insiders due to trauma, and also some insiders to try to take care of the inner ones – as an adult, I’ve not been able to create any non-trauma-related insiders yet. Heck, I’m still getting to know insiders and their purposes, adding in others seems like could add to the confusion-what if I create a new one to serve a purpose, then ‘discover’ one inside who already had that purpose … seems like there could be a conflict.
Yet the concept of creating alters, from non-trauma or non-threatening situations to help with the healing process is not a new concept to me. I discussed the idea when your original post came up about the nurturing mother, how I’ve tried to incorporate/adopt good parental figures. My husband wondered if I could create an insider who just was to be ‘the good wife,’ so to speak. Definitely a lot of selfish motivation on his part for that request; but, sure, I can understand a bit of the request too, because … well, just because.
I’m not saying that these insiders won’t be able to be created by me at some point (the loving parental types, or a good wife); but, I think that I need to process and heal further from my trauma before I can create this type of a healthy alter. Is that making sense to anyone else? I sure hope somebody is speaking wtr-ese today.
I guess I am saying that I am still fresh enough in this journey that I don’t have all the right ideas of what a nurturing, loving part should be like internally; I need to heal more/trust myself more to be able to accept that nurturing. I need to get rid of more of the hurt; I need to grieve more and accept the parts that I do have. Then, once I have more cohesiveness inside, then might be able to decide if creating new alters will work for us.
Good topic, thanks.
wtr
I think I did this alot in later childhood, more consciously, to go into new situations e.g. new school etc. But I’m not sure if that kind of creation of new ‘selves’ is exactly the same as the no-choice creation of new selves in the traumatic experience. I can see how you’re saying it’s a softer, self-accepting way to do this Faith but I am not sure that’s really comparable (even are the types of alters comparable as entities?) to the process of disintegration in childhood trauma…One of the differences might be, the traumatized child had no external sources of selves that were positive, so all the selves that were created then are just holding pain in different ways, however, ones we might create now e.g. mothering alter, would draw on a wealth of more positive experience that we have from others as role models and would be more like borrowing from others?
I guess that’s what I meant by “helper parts”, but you explained it so much better. Like the way you distinguish between making a part out of self-rejection to protect from trauma, and out of self-love, to heal.
On a personal note, I’m not sure I’d know how to create a new part now, maybe it’s still too soon in our healing journey. For now we are just working hard to find new jobs for some of us. I’m trying to learn to be a good mother to our little ones; one protector, who was previously threatening and violent towards other members, is learning to channel his aggression into being assertive and protecting us that way. So not new parts, just new jobs.
I guess I have a couple of comments/questions:
Michael- You describe very well what I was trying to find a way to describe before- my desire for someone to function when I am having problems is more the desire for a host than an alter. This would be a temporary part to manage tasks and functions when other parts of me are triggered. Of course I am not “wired” so to be able to do that. Example being that last night I was very triggered by PTSD stuff and fear sort of took over. I wish I could have a part of me that could just function and not be affected by all the PTSD stuff until the triggering settles down. As a non-multiple, my way of sort of doing this is through roles. The stuff that triggered me last night would not have triggered me if I had been in my role as therapist, or my role as chaplain. Those parts of me just function because they are protected from experiencing my triggers, and yet they can carry with them all my strengths. The memory of something that happened, and that I feared would happen again that got me going last night- was a trigger within an injured part of me (not a role). I have thought a lot about trying to create a “personal role” for me that I could move into when not in a professional situation.- Sort of an idealized self. In fact I have already created her in the fact that she does have a name. I have just not yet come up with a total vision of “who” she is and “how” she is. I think I need to get busy on that one. Of course for me this is all a conscious process. The only level of dissociation going on is the relative ability to separate my fears and anxieties from how these roles function.
Faith- I had a question for you. When you create new helpful parts- such as the nurturing mother, would I be correct in assuming that these are only experienced as part of the internal system, and not as parts that “come out.”?
Hi, Elaine.
Since I integrated my host personality (Faye) in the mid-2000′s, I no longer lose time. So, most of the time, I consciously **choose** to have the Good Mother interact with hurting child alter parts in my head through visualization.
However, when I had Norovirus about a year ago and was feeling very, very sick, she actually came out on her own and started comforting me. I was still co-conscious as I was struggling with the most severe nausea and vomiting of my life. She “stepped into my face” and started saying the things that a loving mother would say, such as, “It’s okay, baby. Mommy’s here. You’re going to be okay.” She actually used my voice to do this, and I was a bit startled by it but also comforted at the same time.
- Faith
This is a very interesting post, Faith, made all the more interesting by the presence of other ‘mpd/did’ patients (o’tay, I’m calling them that, but it ain’t that; it’s something else as we all know!)
In my/our own opinions, and for our own systems, we have found this:
We can “create” a part – somewhat. Think of it as a tinker-toy system. We can ‘take’ three parts and meld them together – sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanent (e.g. the ‘host’ who is writing this is consisting of 3 ‘usual’ socially accepting/acceptable parts, and is able to handle ‘the pain’.)
However, “new” parts CAN spring up out of nowhere. Notice my moniker: Jeffery. And yet that is the part which is most recent to us. He came about last Jan (we are thinking) and has since helped “us” all out a LOT! (He made himself public to ‘us’ on or about April Fools day, LOL!) He is our ‘compassionate being” – the only one and the first one who’d ever been able to embrace our Crowd – and then convince ‘them’ to start embracing each other.
In our system we have found: more than 3 parts ‘running together’ – and the system falls apart (rebooting, LOL!) See http://wp.me/p1t0dv-3X for a ‘running process’ in that we discovered this (yes, we do ‘internal dialogue sometimes on the net for other people’s benefit – and confusion; so that they can ‘see’ what it means to be DID/MPD sort of.) Very hard to do; that one; but we manage (can you say “engine overloading”? LOL’ing!)
But we can ‘identify’ major parts (meaning controllers) ‘coming online’ at certain ages – around 10-13, 21 or so – and we have found that in this system, controllers can take a long time to ‘build’. They (and us, meaning right now I have 2 controllers running in my mind; actually there are 3, but the child one doesn’t ‘count’ as he is no longer in control anymore). – They (as I was saying; forgive me skipping) – THEY take a long time to build, are POWERLESS before the “Majority Rules” kind of thing. (anyone out there relating to that one? Kind of? Kinda not? Can I crawl into your mind and see?)
For instance: yesterday ‘WE” got mad at the city, and tada: Marine Corps ‘controller’ and M3 (kinda me then and there) – and teenage controller (M2, former controller from ‘them times’) – took ‘forward’. Top. Whatever you wanna call it. And we got some work done. Otherwise, it would have never happened (the work I mean.) My other parts ‘can’t handle it’. (won’t go there or into reasons why.) BUT – on the other hand, that kinda mixture can get dangerous. Like those tinkertoys – some of them can be dynamite. Had it been the Marine, the Beast, and M2: (shuddering there.) We were killers then; not like now. (Marines, ya know.)
Soo… can a ‘new part’ be created? Speaking for us: an emphatic YES!! (and we are rejoicing in this one, for Jeffery is quite a man; has led us down the road more on our recovery in the past 30 days than all the shrinky-dinks and doo’s have in the past 30 some odd years). Go figure: the system knows what it wants to create.
Final question: where did that part come from? We have examined him very closely (Scientific Mind and Notetaker come to mind) – and found he seems to be a part of our inner core, which we connect to ‘godhead’ (creative being); right above the angel M. with dark wings. (we have removed the sorrow from his hand; he learned from us; we learned from him; we all learned from god, and Jeffery led us there. Yeah, I’m insane. I talk to god sometimes – and he’s talking back to me. Call it a psychosis if you want. A thousand years ago they would have called it a blessing.)
Anyway: more than enuff right here. Here’s some links on MPD and how I view them. Pruning a Tree is very important to me, for in it I saw god’s hand.
http://jeffssong.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/pruning-a-tree-we-realized
Won’t list any others. I don’t wanna be ‘spamming’ your postings, or even appear to be, o’tay? Is cool? Hoping so.
Until later; and keep up the good work, Lotus of Faith. You’ve given me some puzzles to think about.
Meant to add this one: http://wp.me/p1t0dv-2U – about the difficulty and wonders of ‘embracing ones selves”
Jeffsong- I don’t think you are insane- for talking to god or anything else. It takes rereading some of your lines a couple of times to keep tracking the flow, but it is trackable. The rearranging of parts makes sense- like you describe “tinker toys.” Also brings up thoughts of something else I am aware of- and that is of alters creating alters. Since it is all part of the “we,” it doesn’t matter how how or who experiences the needs, the system can create or reassemble a part to meet the needs.