Dealing with the Aftermath of Flashbacks

This week, I am writing about my experiences in dealing with recovering a flashback as it happens. The series starts here.

It has now been a few days since I had the flashback. I am doing okay. I am actually doing well for the most part, although the pain is still a bit raw.

I shared the story with two friends separately. Both said the right things. One focused on the fact that nothing that happened in the past can change the person that I am today. The other pointed out that S probably thought I was drugged. He knew me before and after and saw how innocent I was. He probably figured I blocked that night out and thought it was best that I did.

What I am struggling with the most right now is coming to terms with the fact that the dissociative identity disorder (DID) really did affect me in adulthood. Up until recently, I believed it was just an issue in childhood. In fact, my therapist never gave me an official diagnosis of DID because I did not report losing time in adulthood. However, I clearly did.

A part of myself is mortified that I have memory gaps that other people could fill but I could not. How many times did I interact with my abusers after the fact and never even know it?

I am also angry that my abusers from childhood left me so vulnerable in adulthood. I was programmed to be a walking doormat for anyone who wanted to use and abuse my body. I fear just how many times I was exploited in adulthood because of my DID.

I am also in awe over how much I have changed. Going back to those times and seeing just how passive I was and then contrasting that person with who I am now is mindboggling. It is hard to believe that I am even the same person.

Overall, I accept that the flashbacks have been a good thing. I am reclaiming parts of myself that I have been pushing away for decades.

A friend worried that something that I had written recently triggered the flashbacks, but I don’t think so. I think I was ready to heal at a deeper level. Until I reclaim all of myself, I will continue to remain fragmented. While I am much more whole than I have ever been, I am still not fully whole. The price of finding wholeness is continuing to discover and heal these wounds.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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Flashbacks: The Morning after Recovering the Flashback

This week, I am writing about my experiences in dealing with recovering a flashback as it happens. The series starts here.

I wrote my last post the morning after recovering the memory (10/24/08). I am writing this one immediately afterward.

I typically recover my memories/experience flashbacks at night. That is the only down time I get throughout the day when it is safe for me to process the memory.

As I recover the memory, it is mostly in flashes (hence the term flashback). However, in the morning, the memory sits in my memory bank just like any other memory. If I want to, I can analyze the memory just as I would any other memory.

Here is my memory of the event this morning:

++++++ sexual abuse triggers ++++++

S (guy friend) and J (my date) picked up B (S’s date) and me from our dorm lobby. We walked together over to the party through the back parking lot. Neither S nor I knew our dates well, but we had been friends for a few weeks (beginning of my college career), so we mostly chatted on the walk over. This bothered B, but J did not seem to care.

We walked over to this house where the party was already going. When we got there, I did not know anyone other than the people I came with. I noticed a guy in the corner sizing me up. I knew he was a threat, and I dissociated. That is why I had no memory of the party – a part of myself was never there.

I don’t think I had ever met this guy before, but he was a predator. He saw the dissociation in me, just as I saw the predator in him, so he knew I was safe to exploit.

I clung to S, talking with him so I would not have to go with the danger guy. B got angry because I was monopolizing her date. She probably thought I was making a play for him, but I wasn’t.

Danger guy chatted with my date (J), and then they told me to come with them to another room. I knew it would be bad, so I tried to get B to come with me so I wouldn’t be alone with them. In retrospect, she probably thought I was a slut and trying to get her to do the same things that I did. She probably saw me as wanting to “be with” every guy at the party, including her date, which explains her animosity toward me after that night.

The predator was so cocky. As soon as we got in the room, he told me to “suck him off.” I did not protest a bit – just got down on my knees and did it. J was astonished, but predator was so d@#$ sure of himself.

It was a child alter part they were manipulating. She had seen her beloved dog die and knew that her younger sister’s life was at stake. She was not about to say no. In fact, she was not even aware that saying no or leaving was an option.

I still don’t remember how many, but it was definitely more than just those two guys. S did “rescue” me from that night. He continued to be nice to me the rest of the year (I transferred to a different school after freshman year).

I never went to another party my freshman year, at least not that I remember at this point. I do not recall ever talking to any of the guys from the party again other than S.

Photo credit: Rosanne Mooney

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Flashbacks: Experiencing the Trauma Again

This week, I am writing about my experiences in dealing with recovering a flashback as it happens. The series starts here.

Last night (10/23/08), I made a point of going to bed an hour early. This is unusual for me. When I know that a flashback is coming, I typically procrastinate and wind up feeling exhausted on top of feeling lousy.

I lit a vanilla-scented candle and liberally applied a chamomile spray to my pillow. I ran my air purifier to serve as white noise. Then, I laid down in my bed in a fetal position and invited the memory to come.

I could feel the terror in my thighs. My yoga instructor used to tell me that we hold our terror in our thighs, and I believe her because my panic attacks often begin with the shaking in my thighs and then move to the rest of my body.

Last night, I kept the shaking only in my thighs because I did not channel energy into it. I was allowing my body to release the terror without fueling the fire.

Then, I thought about the parts that I remembered. I remembered agreeing to go to a party with J (my date), S (my guy friend), and B (guy friend’s date). We walked over to the house together. We had to walk from my dorm through a parking lot where I never wanted to park, even though it was closer to my dorm. (Another mystery solved.)

Once we reached the house, I had a very hard time going in. A part of myself continued to fight remembering. So, I talked myself through it. I said that I am safe now. This event happened over 20 years ago. No matter what happened in that house, I loved myself.

I finally made it into the house. Flash of a guy in the corner to my left. Do I know him? I know he is dangerous. I cling to S and his date, B. B does not like this. Danger guy and J invite me to another room. I try to bring B along, but she doesn’t want to go – just relieved to get rid of me.

+++++ Sexual abuse triggers +++++

Flash to the room. Danger guy telling me to “suck him off.” My complying immediately while J (date) watches. Me giving J oral sex while danger guy circulates the party to invite members to the “private party.”

Eventually, S (my guy friend) is invited in. He goes ballistic, calling them a bunch of @$$holes. S takes me out of the room and takes me back to my dorm. B is furious with him. They fight while we walk. I am just “not there.”

We get back to the dorm, where I “come back.” I say that I’ll see him at the picnic. (It was a picnic, not a dance, that was the future plan.) S says I probably should not go to the picnic. I say okay, but I am very confused.

I see them standing vividly in the lobby to my dorm. I give S back the coat that he draped over my shoulders. B is in her own coat, looking furious.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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Preparing Yourself for Flashbacks after Child Abuse

In my blog entry yesterday, I shared that I would be focusing this week on my experience with dealing with a new flashback. I am writing today’s blog entry on Thursday, 10/23/08.

I have had a pit in my stomach today. Out of nowhere, I started thinking about something that always perplexed me during my freshman year of college. Here is what I remember …

I befriended a guy (S) who was also a freshman. He was in the ROTC and part of a specialized unit. He was a nice guy. I thought he was cute, but there were no sparks between us or anything.

S introduced me to some of his guy friends who were also in this specialized unit. They were going to have some sort of formal dance. S invited B to go with him as his date. B was another freshman who lived on my hall in the dorm.

S introduced me to J, who was also in ROTC. J invited me to go to the dance with him. He also invited me to go to a party with him. S and B were going to be there as well.

I know that I went to the party, but I have no memory of anything that transpired at that party. After the party, I no longer wanted to go to the dance, and I did not go. I do not recall having a conversation in which I said I wasn’t going – I just knew that I wasn’t going to go.

After the party, B hated me. I don’t mean dislike – I mean total loathing, to the point of being quite rude if we came into contact with each other. I had a group of friends who asked why B hated me so much. I honestly do not know the answer.

My friends talked me into extending the olive branch. She did not want to talk to me but let me in her dorm room. I told her that I wanted to apologize for whatever I had done that might have hurt her. I also said that I honestly did not know what I had done to offend her.

B said that I knew d@#$ well what I had done and that she had no interest in any apologies from me. I believe that she said more, but that memory is fuzzy as well. I returned to my own dorm room absolutely baffled. I just tried to avoid her after that.

Soon after all of this happened, I started dating a very nice guy that I was not remotely attracted to. He was innocent and sweet but hardly my type. I am now recognizing a pattern in myself – I did the same thing after the date rape.

Tonight, I am going to give myself permission to remember what happened that night. I am fairly certain that it is sexual in nature – perhaps a gang rape situation. I am going to allow myself to stop the memory part way if I need time to process the first part. I suspect I will be able to process it all in one sitting. I hope so.

I keep reminding myself that, no matter what happened, I am still the same person today. I was also only 17 years old and fresh out of an abusive household, so I likely would have been easily triggered. Most of all, I just want to be kind and gentle with myself.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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Dealing with Flashbacks as Part of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

As I shared in my blog entry entitled Dealing with Memory of Date Rape into Adulthood, I had to deal with a flashback recently. Unfortunately, flashbacks are part of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and I am just going to have to ride them out.

I really believed that I had finished having to work through flashbacks. I had recovered memories through age 17, when I was still living with my mother/abuser. I thought that the abuse had stopped after that.

Unfortunately, even though (I believe) the abuse ended from my mother’s hand, the world had others waiting in the wings to harm me, too. And, because of my dissociative identity disorder (DID), I was the perfect target for those looking to harm an easy victim.

As I shared in another post about the date rape, I simply checked out of my body. My memory is from the perspective of the ceiling. My body is just lying there, doing nothing, as my ex-boyfriend believed that he was taking my virginity. I hoped that was the last time I checked out, but apparently I have more to deal with.

I am about to recover another memory. I can feel the flashback coming. I know that when I go to bed at night, I will recover another horrendous truth. This is one from near-adulthood – when I was a freshman in college at the age of 17. I can feel the weight the pain, even though I don’t have the memory yet.

This week, I am going to document the process as I go through it. I am actually writing this on Thursday night (10/23/08), so I will likely have already dealt with this flashback by the time you read my posts this week. However, I think it will add value to those of you who are dealing with flashbacks or are on the brink of dealing with them to come along for the ride with me.

So, that will be the topic this week. I am hoping that I get through this flashback as well as I did with the date rape one. I felt really badly for a few days and then felt much, much better afterward. I have also set up a support system. I will be meeting a friend for lunch tomorrow to talk about the memory, so I won’t have to go through this alone. And, of course, I have all of you here as well as my friends at isurvive. So, I know that I am going to be okay.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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Holding onto Faith in the Face of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

*** This was supposed to post on 10/21/08. I just realized that it never did. – Faith ***

On my blog entry entitled Riding Out Suicidal Urges, a reader named Matt shared his struggles with being married to a woman with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who has a suicidal alter part. His comment is a long one, so I am not going to reprint it here. I addressed most of his comment in my last blog entry, Helping Spouse with a Suicidal Alter Part.

In this blog entry, I would like to address this part of Matt’s comment:

I’ve been a faith-filled person, but my faith has been stretched to the point that I have a hard time believing in a God who would allow this to happen.

I hear your pain this comment, so I thought it would be worth devoting an entire blog entry to where is God in this situation. Believe it or not, God is all over this situation. When you view the situation from a different perspective, I hope you will be able to hold onto your faith.

DID is not a curse – it is a blessing. Imagine being a three-year-old little child who is being repeatedly raped and tortured. You are so little that you have no means of escape. A 30 lb. child is no match for an adult, even a small adult.

God gives very young children (under six years of age) the ability to flee their bodies. Most of my memories of abuse in childhood come from the perspective of the ceiling. I calmly observed my body being severely abused as my spirit hovered above my body. I was “spared” the abuse because I was not in my body as it was being harmed.

Adults do not have the ability to do this unless they developed DID in early childhood. If adults could flee their bodies during abuse, then prisoners of war (POWs) would have a way to fight back, but they don’t. They are forced to stay in their bodies and experience all of the horror as it happens to them. God lovingly provided young children a way to be spared from this.

When you live in a severely abusive environment, DID is a gift. It is only when the child is removed from the ongoing abuse that the DID becomes maladaptive. Without developing DID, your wife likely would not have survived the abuse. She either would have killed herself, gone insane, or become an abuser herself. The DID spared her from these outcomes and gave her a life with you and your son.

Pastors love to tell their congregations about how much God loves us, but I rarely hear them talk about how much God wants us to love ourselves. This is the key to your wife healing from her DID. In order to fragment her spirit into multiple alter parts, she had to “reject” them as being “her.” The way she will heal from the DID is to love each part back into being one whole spirit.

A wonderful book on the importance of learning to love yourself is Francine Rivers’ Christian novel, Redeeming Love. She flips the story of Hosea to focus upon Hosea’s wife, Gomer (“Angel” in the novel) instead of on Hosea. The novel drive home that, no matter how much God loves you, you are not going to be able to receive that love and heal until you choose to heal yourself. It is a powerful book that might get through to your wife.

One other thing – Many “faith-filled” people believe that suicide = fast-track to hell. I vehemently disagree with this, and there is nothing in the Bible that says this. The Catholic Church implies it because you last act is “murder,” but I do not see suicide as a personal murder. Instead, suicide is a last-ditch attempt to make the emotional pain stop. People who commit suicide are in such deep emotional pain that they are willing to do A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G, even die, to make the pain stop.

That is not murder. I truly believe that greets those who commit suicide with deep love, compassion, and understanding. Nobody other than God fully appreciates the depth of your wife’s pain. God is not going to punish her for not being strong enough to continue enduring such overwhelming pain. I know the weight of that level of pain. I wouldn’t make a dog continue living in that level of pain.

If you have additional questions, please feel free to post them. My heart goes out to you and your situation.

Related Topics:

• Trauma Thursday: Where Was God During the Abuse?
• Where is God During Child Abuse?
• Where Was God When I Was Being Abused?
• Wrestling with a Christian View of God after Abuse

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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Denial after Severe or Extreme Forms of Child Abuse

On my blog entry, Child Abuse: Severe Emotional Abuse, a reader posted the following comment:

I was hoping when I read, “When a person suffers from severe emotional abuse, he might have trouble validating that the abuse was that bad because there was no physical or sexual abuse involved,” that I would read farther and be able to validate my experience as abusive. My “abuser” threatened to kill me (while he had my mouth and nose covered so I couldn’t breathe), to strangle me (while he had his hands around my throat), to break my neck (while he held me up in the air by my head). My abuser threatened to break my arm while he was twisting it behind my back, but in any of these instances he never left a lasting mark. So it couldn’t have been that bad. My therapist says that was abuse and that it was emotional/psychological abuse, but it’s so hard to accept. I just keep thinking that she is a “softy” and doesn’t understand that I just had to be tough in my family and that it wasn’t abuse.

To me, the reader’s experiences were clearly abusive, yet the reader is having a hard time embracing the label of “abuse” for these experiences. This is a common phenomenon among child abuse survivors. My therapist says that mentally ill people try to convince you that they were abused, and child abuse survivors try to convince you that they were not.

I used to share horrific memories with my therapist and immediately follow it up with, “but it wasn’t that bad,” or, “other people have had it worse.” Like this reader, I had a hard time seeing certain traumas as “that bad” because they left no marks on my body. However, some of the my most traumatizing moments did not even involving my being touched, such as when I was forced to “choose” between the life of my sister and my beloved dog and then witness my dog’s execution.

Judith Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery, explains this phenomenon very well. She explains that the abused child needs to minimize the abuse as a coping mechanism. If a child fully grasps how overwhelming the abuse is and how powerless he is to control it, then he will lose the drive to continue fighting to survive and sink into the depths of despair. So, minimizing the gravity of the abuse is actually a coping mechanism that helped you survive.

One way to judge how abusive a situation was is to project it onto somebody else. Imagine that somebody did those things to your child or another child that you love or care about. Would you label those actions as abuse? If yes, then it was abuse.

For some reason, I continue to have a hard time accepting smothering as being physically and emotionally abusive. Even though I almost died from smothering, it left no marks on me. My parents saw me immediately afterward and noticed nothing. All of this has made it difficult for me to embrace this traumatizing event as “that bad.”

And yet I continue to experience body memories from that experience. Why would I have repeated body memories if that experience was no big deal? And if somebody smothered my kid and almost killed him, I would definitely label that action as abuse and do everything I could to get that person locked away in prison. I would also get my child lots of therapy and feel guilty for leaving him alone with a person who would do such a thing to him. So, why don’t I have that same reaction about the abuse toward myself?

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): Animal Alter Parts and Other Nonhuman Alter Parts

Over on Isurvive.org, my favorite message board for child abuse survivors, a member posted a question about whether somebody with dissociative identity disorder (DID) could have an animal alter part. The answer to this question is yes.

I had never read or heard about animal alter parts until discovering one in myself. I was lying in my bed, and I felt myself transforming into a wolf. I could feel the fur on my body, and my hands shaped themselves into paws, with my fingers being the claws. I “was” a wolf. To say this freaked me out is an understatement.

Then, I learned that this happened the night before the full moon. At this point, I determined that I truly was crazy and beyond help. Fortunately, I had knowledgeable friends over at Isurvive to talk me through this. Most ritual abuse takes place at the full moon, when there is better lighting for seeing and photographing the abuse, so it makes sense that I would need a protector part as the full moon approached.

People with DID have protector alter parts. Think about DID from a child’s perspective. The point of having alter parts is to protect the child from being harmed. While the child flees the body through dissociation, she leaves behind a protector part to fight back and provide the child with the illusion of safety.

Whatever you, as a child, felt was strong or scary was likely incorporated into an alter part. For me, the wolf in the story “Peter and the Wolf” was one of the scariest creatures I could think of, so I created a wolf alter part. That part comes out every night to curl up around me while I sleep. To this day, my wolf protects me as I sleep. I have tried to integrate this part multiple times, but I guess I still do not feel safe enough to “retire” my wolf.

I also had a snake alter part, which I integrated. Other people have alter parts that are lions, bears, dogs, or other animals. Animal alter parts can be anything that seemed scary to them as children.

I have also heard of people with DID having other types of nonhuman alter parts, such as dolls. Any inanimate object that had significance to you as a child could have been incorporated into your multiple system.

If you have a nonhuman alter part, you are completely normal. Your nonhuman alter part served a function as part of your DID multiple system. Love this part just as you would love any other part of yourself.

Related Topics:

• How to Integrate Animal Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) Alter Parts
• Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): Types of Alter Parts
• Interesting Article about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
• Safe Passage to Healing

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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How to Process Anger after Child Abuse

On my blog entry How to Forgive an Abuser after Child Abuse, a reader posted the following question:

Yeah, I know there must be rage. It bubbles up a little now and again. I am scared of its depths. I want to find it, connect with it, but something is blocking me…perhaps fear? How did you get in touch with it? How did you find it? I find others’ experiences helpful.

Anger (or rage) was the emotion that I most deeply repressed. I felt so disconnected from my anger that I honestly did not believe that I even had any. My therapist assured me that I did and that I would process it when I was ready.

Although I felt no anger, I felt an enormous amount of anxiety, manifesting in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms. I also struggled with depression on and off. I later learned that both anxiety and depression are a manifestation of repressed anger. Because the anger has nowhere to go, it turns on you.

I finally reached a place where I knew that I needed to heal my anger, but I did not have the first clue about how to get in touch with it. I decided to lock myself in a room when I had the house alone and invite the anger out. I thought I would punch pillows and see what happened. I was scared about how I would handle the anger if it came out because feeling anger was such a foreign concept to me.

I punched a pillow hard once, then twice, and then three times. Nothing happened, and I felt like an idiot. However, on the fourth punch, rage exploded out of me. It felt like releasing the force of a hurricane from inside of myself. For fifteen minutes, I screamed and cursed at my abusers. I beat, clawed, and mangled the pillows. I was scared, and yet it felt soooo good — like this was something that should have been released years ago.

After about fifteen minutes, I was spent. I was also relieved. Even though my anger/rage was powerful, it was not uncontrollable. It just needed somewhere to go, and it felt wonderful to pour that energy out of myself. Immediately afterward, I noticed a dramatic decrease in my OCD symptoms.

Since that time, I have used a couple of other tools. My ritual abusers used popsicle sticks to “program” me, so I fought back using popsicle sticks. I bought a box of them at a craft store. One by one, I broke the popsicle sticks and yelled taunts at my abusers. I saved the broken sticks and, when needing to process more anger toward my ritual abusers, I would throw the popsicle sticks at the wall. Hearing them hit the wall and watching the broken pieces fall to the floor was healing for me.

One other helpful tool has been visualization. I will visualize the child me about to be harmed. Then, the adult me swoops in and kicks some serious butt. I allow those visualizations to get as graphic as I need them to get. This has become my preferred method for processing anger.

Other tools that work for other people include…

• Beating the ground with a baseball bat
• Popping red balloons with the abusers’ names written on them
• Taking a kickboxing class
• Writing an angry letter that you don’t plan to send

Doing something physical is often the best way to get started with processing anger.

Related Topics:

• How to Heal Repressed Anger After Childhood Abuse
• Trauma Tuesday: Relationship Between Anger and Anxiety & Depression
• Associating Emotions with Traumatic Memories
• How to Express Emotions

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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Helping Spouse with a Suicidal Alter Part

On my blog entry entitled Riding Out Suicidal Urges, a reader named Matt shared his struggles with being married to a woman with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who has a suicidal alter part. His comment is a long one, so I am not going to reprint it here. However, I do want to address the questions that he posted in his comment.

Let’s begin with this statement:

[My wife] was abused by a teacher in high school, but was probably abused way before then as well.

Yes, if your wife has DID, then she definitely experienced other abuses. In order to develop DID, a child must experience severe and ongoing abuse before reaching the age of around six years old. If the only memory that she has of her abuse history is this incident with the teacher, then her alter parts likely hold the memories of all of the early childhood trauma.

It is possible that this suicidal alter part is causing so many issues because your wife is ready to start facing her history. Many people with DID suffered from organized pedophilia, otherwise known as ritual abuse or “cult” abuse. These are a group of people who know how to manipulate an alter part to self-destruct if the person ever tells about what happened.

Your wife created the suicidal alter part to protect her from severe abuse. Her abusers manipulated (“programmed”) the alter part into believing that suicide was a better option than breaking the silence. In my case, the threat was killing my younger sister. So, I would rather kill myself than see my sister killed because I told.

Your wife can dismantle the programming and integrate the suicidal alter part, but she must be the one to choose to do it. You can lock up everything in the house, but you cannot watch her 24/7. She could submerge her face in the toilet and try to drown herself while you think that she is using the bathroom. Rather than live like this, I strongly suggest getting your wife therapy with a qualified therapist who has experience in counseling people with DID or at least several child abuse.

I also suggest that you purchase the book Safe Passage to Healing and read it. Also, encourage your wife to read it. The book explains all about DID, alter parts, and ritual abuse. For your wife to have such a severely suicidal alter part, I strongly suspect programming. This book explains how to dismantle the programming.

You mention that you are a faith-filled person and that your faith has been stretched to the limit. I will address this part of your comment in my next blog entry.

Related Topics:

• Where is God During Child Abuse?
• Where Was God When I Was Being Abused?
• Wrestling with a Christian View of God after Abuse

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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