Dealing with Floods of Emotions

On my blog entry entitled Controlling the Darker Parts of Ourselves after Child Abuse, a reader posted the following comment:

What if [your emotions] don’t come ONE at a time?!? What if its a flood? I might be able to deal with all of the emotions if I could control them, and release them one at a time! But that isn’t how it happpens for me! I don’t get a choice with how fast they happen, or which ones to ‘let out.’ It just happens on its own. ~Theresa

I strongly recommend that Theresa and anyone else dealing with this issue read Chrystine Oksana’s Safe Passage to Healing. She has a great chapter entitled Associating Emotions that deals with just about any question you might have about dealing with emotions.

Here is some advice that she has to offer on the subject:

Associating dissociated emotions may be confusing for a while. Survivors have coped with skewed emotions for so long that distorted emotions feel normal. Many have to learn basics such as how natural emotions feel and what they are… Survivors usually avoid associating emotions until they feel overwhelmed. It comes a question of which is worse—living with unbearable tension or coping with unbearable feelings. A better approach is to schedule emotional release on a regular basis. Even five minutes a day can help…If five minutes feels like too much, start with thirty seconds, increase it to a minute, and so on. With each release, you will feel stronger, more alive, more energized, and more genuine. ~ Safe Passage to Healing, pp. 228-229

Until you allow yourself to begin to feel your emotions, you are going to stay in this hellish place. The healing process has its own rhythm, and it knows what it is doing. If you will release yourself into the guidance of your healing process and release emotions as you feel the need, you will experience an incredible about of healing. The more you fight it, the more painful and stressful the process will become.

I strongly recommend working together with your therapist as you begin allowing yourself to experience your emotions. If you are afraid to “let go” in private, then perhaps doing so under the supervision of your therapist will help you feel safer to do it.

When I first released my anger, I feared that it would rage on and on. In reality, it was an intense 20 minutes, but then it was over for that session. I did not hurt myself or anyone else, and the feeling was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

If you keep doing what you have always done (repressing the emotions), you are going to keep getting the same results. It takes courage to risk feeling your emotions, but it really is a key part of healing. You will be amazed at how much better you feel afterward.

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What is a Host Personality and the Core?

On my blog entry entitled Recovery from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a reader posted the following question:

Can you explain terms like ‘core host personality in more detail? ~ Jolson

I got the term host personality from Chrystine Okasana’s book Safe Passage to Healing. Here is an excerpt from that book (page 115):

Some survivors develop an alter to function more or less steadily in day-to-day life. This self typically has no awareness of the abuse and may be known as the host. The host, too, feels overwhelmed. In the November/December 1992 issue of The Sciences, Dr. Frank W. Putnam writes:

“Typically, the host is depressed, anxious, rigid, frigid, compulsively good, conscience-stricken…and suffers any number of physical symptoms, most often headaches. Host personalities usually feel overwhelmed by life, at the mercy of forces far beyond their control. In many cases a host is either unaware of the alter personalities or, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, strongly denies their existence.”

I was not overly wild about the term “host personality,” but since this is terminology known in some DID circles, I have adopted this label for Faye, who was my host personality.

The term “core” is all my own, and I used it because I have not yet found a label used in DID circles to describe what I mean by this. If anyone is familiar with a commonly used label for what I describe below, please let me know.

My experience is that I had numerous alter personalities and personality fragments (well into the hundreds) who “hid” behind the “mask” of the host personality. However, there was still a continuity within my spirit, which is what I call the core. My “switching” was always seamless with the appropriate alter part coming out at the appropriate time to handle any given situation. I believe my core was the glue that held all of these parts together.

As I began integrating these formerly “frozen” parts (which I define as loving and accepting each part as “me”), they “melted” back into one “body of water” inside. That body of water is what I refer to as my core. My host personality “melted” into this core, my inner child Annie awakened and melted into the core, and numerous other alter parts also “melted” into the core. Today, I feel like the majority of myself is in this core, with numerous formerly separate parts now interwoven and working together as one (like pouring a bucket of salt water back into the ocean). My core is now the part I view as “me.”

I still have alter parts that I need to “melt” through love and acceptance. They hold frozen memories and emotions that I have yet to process. As I heal them, those parts will join the core. If I live long enough to work through it all, then all that will be left inside is one core – nothing is lost, and all parts are now part of one big ocean.

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Resources for Those Healing from DID

On my About Faith Allen page, a reader posted the following comment:

hi, just discovered your site- congratulations on your integration- we have a daughter who has been suffering for over 17 years, many treatments, many drs., many hospitalizations- not much progress- currently in crisis- looking for help again- who and what helped you? would you mind sharing this info? we would go anywhere just to find person/persons/hospitals. etc. who could be of help
thanks!

The most important element in healing is choosing to heal. Until a person decides that he or she is willing to do anything to heal, you can invest in all the resources in the world, and it is not going to make much of a difference. Choosing to heal is hard work. You have to relive painful memories, and you have to accept that these horrible things happened to me. Until a person reaches this place, resources are going to be of limited value.

If your daughter is sick to death of being in this awful place and is ready to begin the hard work of healing, I have several resources for her:

Books

The two “must reads” for a survivor of severe child abuse are Safe Passage to Healing (book about healing from ritual abuse and understanding Dissociative Identity Disorder -DID) and the Survivor to Thriver Manual (walks you through the healing process in a non-triggering way). Another great resource is The Courage to Heal.

Online Resources

Isurvive is a message board for survivors of all forms of child abuse. The Survivors of Ritualized Abuse forum is for those who suffered the most severe forms of trauma. It is also the place to talk about DID-related issues. The Sidran Institute is another great resource, offering lots of helpful articles on healing from severe child abuse.

Therapy

It is crucial that your daughter work with a qualified therapist with experience in working with survivors of severe child abuse. In my experience, the therapist does not have to be a DID specialist as long as he “gets” what alters parts are and their function. Healing from DID is too difficult to do alone. I strongly advise working closely with an educated therapist.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

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