Hi. My name is Megan Hebert. I'm here on behalf of the protectors. Thought I'd try to demystify the concept of protectors a bit. If you're just discovering that you have DID, you might could use some info. If you have friends or family who have DID, you might could use some info. If you're a therapist, you might could use some info that's not in the books. Sorry if that's a slap in the face. Wasn't meant that way. My point really is no matter who you are, I hope what I have to say is useful. I tend not to trust many therapists, but that's just because my crowd has had some bad experiences and, well, it's my job not to trust too quickly. I'd like to see more therapists learning from the people they treat instead of just learning about them. But that's a tangent, and I'm not going off on it right now.
Ok, first of all, there are, in my opinion, different kinds of protectors. There are just plain protectors like me and some of the others in this crowd. We're not intentionally cruel. We may seem a bit cold and hard at first, at least until we get to know a person and feel that it's safe to let the guard down a bit. In reality, we actually make very loyal friends. The key to winning our trust is to tell the truth, even if it hurts. We can tolerate things which would normally be painful for the rest of the group. We act kind of as a funnel. We take the full force of the painful stuff and try to scale it down to a tolerable level before it gets to the weaker ones. This doesn't always work. That's because we do happen to be human, and somewhere we do have weaknesses and triggers.
I am getting ahead of myself, though. There are other kinds of protectors. There are some protectors, like Madison, whose job it is to be kind of immune to triggers. If you read Madison's page, what I've said here will make a lot of sense. If you don't know about something, you obviously can't be upset by it, and if you aren't upset by it, you obviously have no need to leak it back to the others. You're off in your own little world, almost. The tough thing about dealing with protectors like Madison is that we have to share enough information with them that we don't lose track of what goes on while they are out and they can still act normal, whatever that is, so that the rest of the world doesn't think Sarah's fallen off her rocker. That's a hard balance to keep. We do not tend to employ protectors like Madison very often.
There are protectors who will go to war for the system if necessary, and there are protectors who prefer to sit and negotiate. There are others who can see situations as totally ridiculous, and they have no qualms about just getting up and walking away from something that is threatening.
All right, now back to the idea of protectors as human. We don't have anybody in here named God. Not as an alter, anyway. So all of us have a threshold of pain. If that threshold is reached and the pain does not stop, we have some options. We can totally flip out and probably send the system into what we call meltdown, in which functioning is just completely lost. We can split--and a splitting protector is not a pretty site. We can give some of the pain to someone else in the system who may or may not be so willing to share it. We can reach out and get some help or do something about what's causing the pain. What we do depends entirely on how much control we perceive we have over the cause of the pain, what options we perceive we have for stopping or controlling it, and how fast we have to think. Usually we are pretty strong and can think very rationally. But when there are not many protectors to share the load and one is reaching the threshold, things become extremely difficult for the entire system. When a protector gets depressed, it's just not a good sign at all.
Because we are residents in the same mind, we can have the same triggers as others in the group. This is not always something we acknowledge, and it may not even be something we know until one of them is activated. Telling when a protector is triggered is sometimes kind of hard. We don't respond to our triggers in the same way that others do. Some of us will fly into a rage. Sometimes we shift the focus to some other issue which is only remotely similar. Sometimes we just plain shut down and go on with life almost as if nothing was wrong, but a perceptive person who knows us may feel frightened or upset by this change in us because the kind of behavior and emotion we exhibit changes. A lot of us claim to not feel emotion, but on some level deep within we do feel some kind of emotion. It's just not something we're in touch with often. If we were, we couldn't do our jobs.
Are protectors loyal to the system? That's a tough one. Some of us are fiercely loyal. That makes our threshold a bit lower than we'd like it to be, but we're the ones who will usually lay it all on the line, stand up for what is right and fair, etc. Others do their jobs because it's all they know. If they did not do their jobs, they wouldn't be themselves. That's just how they see it. Of course, both kinds of protectors are vital.
I have a lot more to say, not necessarily about protectors. I'm
writing it up... So please come back. :) (Yes, I do smile--it's
a newly acquired skill. I last wrote something here on March 21, 1999.