by Sarah
In the fall of 1996, I was by all appearances an energetic young woman with lots of potential. I was in school, taking a full load of psychology classes. I was newly married, and my husband and I were directing a small youth choir at our church. On Sundays, we put on smiles and went to church, never letting on how much it hurt us that we weren't building friendships with other church members. Several factors probably contributed to the problem, but knowing this didn't make it any easier. During the week, we fought more and more. Most of the time our fights were about little things. But both of us carried old wounds and poor communication skills into the marriage. I began to feel very anxious. I was aware that I was avoiding my feelings, and I often felt as if I was losing my mind and could have a breakdown at any moment. What would happen then? Would I start doing strange things and claiming I was Nanette? The thought terrified me!
I began to write about it in my journal and in letters to a couple of the people from an email list. I confessed my fear and told my friends that I had been a daydreamer and had written stories since I was very young. I had always maintained elaborate listings of the characters for my stories. Finally, one day, I sat down with one of these lists and examined the characters. I realized as I did this that some of them were much more real to me than ideas on paper. I could hear them speaking in my head--and it was not always while I was writing that I heard them.
By the time I was finished, I had a listing of 11 characters who apparently represented pieces of my life's experience. I was frightened, but with the help of one of my friends from the list, I began to research dissociative identity disorder and to get to know these different "selves". I was not Sarah without Cara, Elaina, Faith, Amber, Beth... I was only a piece of Sarah. At first, I tried to control the activities of my mind, to put the pieces of this puzzle which was me together. After all, integration was the goal. It was not normal to be a person in pieces, a "multiple". I despised the term. It conjured up images of Sybil, images of a crazy person with no friends and no ability to relate to or live successfully in the world.
Before long, I realized that I could not control these pieces of me like dolls. They were personifications of aspects of myself. Like people, they had their own opinions and memories which they wanted to share with me. They had their own anger, and I had mine. Qualitatively, my anger was different from theirs. They had their own strengths and weaknesses. And why wouldn't they? They were pieces of me. ... The goal was not to control them but to understand and accept them as parts of me. I was already "put together". I just needed to learn to understand the whole me and not only the part which was functioning at a given moment.
Using this approach, it didn't take long for me to become comfortable with "my crowd". I learned that some of them were harder for me to understand or accept than others because of the pain they represented. But others represented positive aspects of me. One of these was Cara. I remembered when Cara "was created". Of course, she had always been there; but she became Cara, a separate being from Sarah, when I could no longer see myself as capable of certain things. I liked her, and she could accept the others and she knew how to live and enjoy life. I began to depend on her to help me experience life.
Over the years, I have learned many things about my selves and how and why they came to exist as separate beings in my mind. I am and have long been a daydreamer. In some cases, daydreaming was my escape from pain. In other cases, it was my way of entertaining myself since I couldn't do so by looking around. This has been a painful realization, but it is one that needs to be recognized.
I also tend to empathize well with other people, and sometimes that empathy resulted in the creation of a person in my mind to represent the part of me which felt that empathy. This was especially true in situations where there was a problem which was not resolved. Perhaps the creation of those persons was my way of trying to understand the situation by recreating it and trying to devise a solution to the problem inside myself since I could not solve the problem outside myself.
The people in my mind were of all ages. I learned that a child might not have been created during childhood. A child might have come into being later, at a time when I felt that my feelings were not appropriate feelings for an adult to have. The same was true of the teenagers. However, I noticed that the teenagers were often "too grown up" and took on responsibilities which should have belonged to adult parts of me.
My selves represented not only painful experiences but also internal conflicts such as career choice. For various reasons I had great difficulty in narrowing down my interests. I found that I had adult selves to represent several of these interests.
Finally, there were the selves I thought of as angels. I liked the idea that angels were there to comfort me and help me in my journey. I realized eventually that they were not angels but pieces of me, like all the others. My habit of personifying aspects of myself had become so strong that I had personified the positive as well as the negative. No wonder I felt so empty!
Getting to Know Your Selves
As I began to understand my selves, I also began to help others who were in similar situations. This page contains some of the suggestions I gave to others as they began to learn about their selves.
Getting to Know Them: The Inside People
This is one person's description of the types of "alters" in her system. These characteristics may or may not apply to other people. I found them helpful in understanding my selves.
Communication
Here are some more practical suggestions for getting the parts of yourself to communicate with each other.
Ideas for Mapping Your Inside Family
Here are some great suggestions for things to find out about your selves.
Living With Your Selves: A Survival Manual for People With Multiple Personality Disorder
This book provides some suggestions for getting to know your selves as well as other self-help resources.