Healing

Are we healing from DID/MPD, or are we healing from abuse?  Specifically, is our problem that we are multiple, or that we experienced trauma?  Talk about the difference between healing from abuse or healing from DID, or if you think there *is* a difference.

1 thought on “Healing

  1. Jigsaw Analogy--ellis

    well, i (or someone who lives in my body) was the one to bring up this topic.

    i think for me, there is a difference between focusing on healing from abuse, and healing from DID/MPD. and i guess for collective-me, it works out better to focus on healing from abuse than from dissociation. “healing from dissociation” tends to make parts feel like “healed” then has to equal “not being multiple,” and there’s a lot of resistance to that. and, honestly, i can’t see that being multiple, in itself, is harmful.

    but definitely, being multiple has a big impact on the healing process. mostly, it’s a matter of accepting that there are a lot of different parts with their own experiences, both of the things that happened, and of the ways we have tried to heal. and so it’s important, in healing from abuse, to do it in a way that actually allows all of the different parts a chance to heal.

    i’ve also started to wonder whether i’m multiple solely because of abuse, or whether i might have been inclined towards some kind of multiple personality even without the abuse. not so much the separation between parts, or the difficulty in communicating, but the fact that my brain seems to lean naturally towards separation. i mean, ok, i know that things that count as traumatic started happening to me when i was an infant, so maybe it’s just that i started splitting before i was conscious of being anything other than multiple.

    but i’m also thinking about authors, and how they can have so many different “voices” and such fully realized characters. if anyone else has read “The Penderwicks,” there’s a character in that who made me start wondering about that side of things. basically, she has her story characters, and they will sometimes “take over” as she lives her life. and she can’t always predict what she will do when they are there, and so on, just as though they were different parts of her.

    so i wonder if what makes DID a disorder is more the separation and amnesia, or the fact that a lot of parts are stuck in the past, which would be due to trauma, and the multiplicity itself isn’t a problem. just a thought.

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