snippets of childhood -- revisited

Note: this was written in November of 1998; a lot has changed since then.

 

I once felt as if my memories of childhood were behind a huge black wall, unaccessable at all. Later, after much therapy, I saw them as locked in a huge black tower, and that every so often the Guardians of the Tower would condescend to allow one out. My main feeling was that those memories of mine had to sneak their way out, rather like prisoners starting a riot; in the ensuing ruckus, a few of them would have a chance to break free, unnoticed. In the time since I wrote that, I have discovered a few more things about myself that have shed light on this analogy of mine.

In the past year I have had free access to the Internet, and I have come to realize that what I thought was merely avoidance of studying was also parts of myself searching for a way to express themselves. What would seem at first to be an aimless search around the Web would end up being a discovery of importance to some aspect of myself. When I was feeling extreme culture shock of being a pagan at a Methodist school, I found pagan sites on the Web that were a balm to my soul. When I began to feel awkward about my gender ambiguity, I found transgender sites that helped me to accept this ambiguity.

So when I began work on my webpage in April, I wanted to make it more than a page that had my favorite stuff on it. I played around with the idea of making it a Cajun information page, but that idea never got very far. After a lot of thought, I decided to create a subpage called “Abeille: A Cajun Grrl’s CyberZine.” It has grown from being a few pages of art, poetry, and essays into a full fledged website of its own. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

From the beginning, I wanted Abeille to be a resource for other survivors out there, and so I surfed around for sites to link to and ideas to grow from. On one of my many webcrawling expeditions, I came across a site in the Let The Truth Ring Out webring, and followed the webring around to other sites. One was called Spoty’s Home Page, by SpotyDawg, a person with multiple personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder. I enjoyed her page immensely, especially the section called (I think) Lil’s Play Land. I liked it so much I made a similar one of my own, which was called (at that time) The Inner Child Playground. Through other excursions around the web, and other people’s visits to my guestbook, I found a lot more pages with information about MPD/DID, which interested me, but I’d still say, “nah, that’s not me.”

Then I came aross a page called “Shattered Selves,” which spoke of a concept new to me: co-consciousness. Put simply, a co-conscious multiple does not lose time when different alters take over the body, but all the alters are pretty much aware of the others, even if they do not know yet that they are alters. She had on her site an interview with her husband and her daughter, asking about how they realized their wife/mother was a multiple. The husband described times that, during arguments, she would begin to cry like a child and talk about things from the past that had nothing to do with their argument. He would begin to suspect somthing, but since all he knew about multiples was Sybil, and his wife didn’t lose time, he didn’t give it much more thought.

When I read these things, I cried, because there was such a sense of familiarity with these stories. “I definitely fit the profile, and it sure would explain a lot of things,” I said to myself. So, after much consideration, I decided to be open to the possibility that I might be multiple. And so I said to myself, “If I were a multiple, who would my personalities be, what are they like?” So I began to write down things as they came to me; I tried my best to let the personalities (or as I say now, the people inside) tell me about themselves. The more I worked on it, the more true the whole thing seemed to me.

Eventually I shared these feelings with Suzy, and not unexpectedly she was skeptical. In fact, I think I would have been surprised if she hadn’t been unsure about the whole thing. But of course I was still fearful she would reject this theory of mine altogether. After much reassurances that I was not regressing, she accepted that this was a way I was dealing with my traumas, and would be accepting as long as it did not make me get worse instead of better. Seemed a reasonable attitude to me.

But I was talking about the Tower once upon a time, wasn’t I? Becoming acquainted with the people inside gave me a better understanding of what the Tower represents. Before I did any therapy at all, the Tower was not even visible at all, due to a huge black wall that surrounded it. Once therapy was begun, the wall was taken down brick by brick. But what I soon discovered was that beyond the wall was a huge black Tower, and this was where most of the memories were kept. When I would get too close, the Guardians of the Tower would threaten me. “Oh, you really don’t want to come in here. You know the pain you’ve felt all these years? Well, what’s in here is a hundred times worse, believe us. We’re doing you a favor, honestly. Go away.” And I would. It stood to reason: why would my mind build the Tower if what was in it wasn’t horrible?

But after some years, a plateau in therapy was reached, and a new type of therapy was tried: abreactive eye movement desensitization therapy. This new therapy had the effect of a battering ram on the Tower, and the pain I had long been threatened with turned out to be pain I was quite familiar with, although until then I never really knew where it came from.

After many sessions of this therapy, I was convinced the Tower was no more. Wrong. It was there, but now I could sneak a few memories out here and there. But why was it still there, I wondered? What haven’t I worked through yet?

All this is supposition, of course, but this is my theory. The Tower is still there because the people inside are the Guardians. Their job was (and still is) to make sure that I was ready for whatever memories each was guarding. When the system was ready for their memories, they could leave the Tower and not be a Guardian any more.

Some Guardians, of course, had less painful memories to guard than the others, so they were the first to leave. We begin to suspect that most have left, but not all. The little who calls herself wabbit, for example, has been so traumatized by her duties that she has been unable to speak, and could only whimper and cry. Sometimes she has been so angry about being stuck where she was that she would give the system a taste of her pain.

For some reason, wabbit is still guarding memories of other extremely traumatic experiences. We wonder why? We wonder if it has anything to do with almost drowning at the age of about four. (Gut instinct says maybe.) Was it something else even more hideous, like incest? (Don’t really think so.) Another gut feeling is that some of the Guardians gave her some of their memories/traumas to guard. That would make more sense.

We also are beginning to sense that some people identified as distinct three months ago are already merging. Such as Dee and Chiquita merging into Kikkity, and Marc and Boudreaux. It is likely that wabbit would be the last to integrate, she is very defensive about her autonomy. Although she would consider it with Kikkity and Spyder, the animal-like alters she trusts. None of the artist alters (with the possible exception of Robin) would be expected to merge with Deborah, although it is possible Marc/Boudreaux would.

 

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