When You're Processing DID Trauma Someone Else Lived Through
What it's like, to have your system invalidate your trauma for decades, only to be confronted after system discovery with the horrific trauma your younger parts hold
Trigger Warning: CSA and SA
If you’ve been reading my recent posts about my Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis or any of my writing on other platforms, then you know that I have suspected for years that a particular family member sexually assaulted me in early childhood.
Our body lived through the trauma I will be talking about, and some of our alters lived through it, but we did not all live it or perhaps just don’t remember we did.
Whether or not I lived through all of our trauma is up for debate and involves knowledge with which I do not currently have access.
That is why believing some of our recovered trauma is so difficult. It doesn’t quite feel like it could be true. That’s called emotional amnesia, and it’s a powerful and devastating skill to possess.
Many people view amnesia with Dissociative Identity Disorder as something that would be fun. Just forget the parts of your life you don’t wish to remember.
Tuck your dress into your underwear back in high school? Just wipe that memory out. Go through an intense breakup? Wipe that memory out as well.
They think it would be like their own version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Having bad memories blacked out can be great, but as the host, you don’t get to choose which ones you lock away and which ones you keep.
At least I don’t in my system (and every system is different),
So it’s like the movie but also not. Though that bit at the end where the main character is panicking to keep his memories of Clementine is kind of what grey-out amnesia is like.
It’s like trying to hold onto mercury.
So, no, that is not how DID works. In fact, some intense and traumatic memories are in sharp relief for me, and some aren’t.
That paradox makes no sense to me, but I can’t consciously control the amnesia. It is what it is.
Even so, I am no less a DID system for remembering some of our trauma; it’s far more common in DID than people think.
You don’t have to have blacked out your entire childhood or even great big swathes of your life to have it, and as one proceeds on their DID discovery journey, one soon realizes they can’t recall as much of their past as other people do.
Once trauma resurfaces, it becomes obvious that one’s memory has been far more distorted than one realized. That is so disorienting.
When one can’t feel emotionally connected to their trauma the way singlet CSA survivors can, it soon becomes absurd and a bit terrifying.
In many ways, it’s the head trip to end all head trips.
Uncovering the existence of my CSA trauma started with a knowing I could not explain beyond intuition and the memories held by the body.
My brain doesn’t remember my CSA trauma in the classical sense because we were too young, but my body has been signalling the hosts for decades that our narrative was incomplete.
When our host was in therapy for the first time as a 20-year-old, they suspected CSA due to our violent rages after group therapy sessions where we had listened to CSA trauma being described in detail by other group members.
Post group therapy sessions, we also began writing violent fragments of accounts of abuse in our journal, which we found bewildering and confusing.
The host had no idea why they were doing that and felt almost demon-possessed. If we had still been Christians, we might have thought we were.
The host grew ever more suspicious when our brain began to equate eating meat with fellatio (which, to the best of the host’s operating knowledge, we had never performed because sex scared the hell out of us).
After writing in that journal, we never looked at it again, and after hauling it around with every move for decades, we finally threw it out last year when we became homeless. We now wish we hadn’t done so.
We mentioned our suspicions and concerns to our then psychiatrist, but he discounted our paltry bits of evidence, telling us that we were just not willing to face the emotional abuse our mother had put us through.
These vague suspicions of our extended family member could not be succinctly codified for a mental health professional to find believable back in the mid 1990s.
A few years after college, when our perpetrator died, we had another odd experience. We watched him dying and devoid of feeling. sat and thought, “Why don’t you just die faster?”
When he did finally pass, we were relieved, and despite our previous suspicions, we did not understand our indifference to his death.
It did not consciously make sense, and yet, it felt like it did.
Our knowing that something had happened was also in every icky feeling we had when the perpetrator had hugged us or said our birth name with the prefix “miss”.
During a recent therapy session, we remembered him calling us “miss” and then heard his voice for the first time in years saying our dead name in our head.
I had to stop talking to the therapist at that point because I felt like throwing up or tearing my skin off. I have often had a similar reaction to his photo.
My inklings about past CSA were there at his funeral when a brazen and possibly more burdened alter made a drive-by cameo at the front and blurted out to some of my cousins, “I bet we all have repressed memories because of him.”
Our cousins were aghast, as was the host.
That host had to act fast to smooth it over by pointing out that we had a dark sense of humor and then apologized for our inappropriate joke. Despite the comment getting a lot of side-eye, the explanation seemed to be accepted.
Even though we hosts had been putting the pieces together for years, we still didn’t trust our intuition.
I, or the host at the time, wrote our suspicions off as merely neurotic, attention-seeking conjecture and went on with our life.
That was likely not a conscious choice. Our system likely sowed those seeds of doubt and wiped our memory. The gatekeeper was doing their level best to keep our trauma contained at all costs.
Sometimes gatekeepers are a bit overzealous and overly dramatic about their job. Sometimes this is a good thing, and other times system gatekeepers engage in overkill.
They keep too tight a grip on information even when safety might be better achieved through knowing more of the truth.
Ten years ago, at Christmas, my youngest aunt randomly confided in me that when she was a pre-teen, my grandmother warned her never to be alone with said predatory family member.
From my current vantage point, my aunt just dropped this truth bomb out of nowhere, but I admit that I have no context as to how that revelation came up in conversation, as we have forgotten most of that era of our life.
All I remember is that upon hearing her confession, our blood ran cold with fear and perhaps recognition. You would think that, at that point, we would have shared our suspicions of CSA with a mental health professional, but instead, we promptly buried that information for another 9 years
Even two years ago, at age 52, when visual fragments, a potential third-person POV visual flashback, and somatic memories began surfacing, there was still so much doubt.
We waffled back and forth for a month with a crying child wailing non-stop in our head until we fully accepted that something did happen. Only then did the crying stop.
However, we had no time to process our trauma because we had to prepare ourselves to get through homelessness.
Then the shit hit the fan last summer when our DID system started unraveling while living in the family shelter.
After a year of being puzzled as to why I’d rewatched an episode of Doctor Who with no recognition that I had previously seen it, I finally worked out why my brain had given me amnesia for that episode.
A guest-starring actor who appeared in that episode closely resembled my perpetrator as he had looked when I was a child.
That realization gave me a terrible headache, and I experienced my first hard switch. Although I didn’t realize that was the case until much later.
Not long after that, having researched dissociative disorders for a month or so (because I was fast noticing how my behavior didn’t track), I meditated and quickly saw parts in my head.
I saw 5 or 6 parts, one of which was a girl who was a piece of paper and one that was a dark pocket at the back of our head. I was shook. I sat stunned in disbelief for an hour.
Next, about a week later, a child part overtly fronted for the first time, crying that she was afraid. I wasn’t, but she was. I realized then that I was in the passenger seat and someone else had taken over control of my body.
I feared I was going insane.
It all seemed too preposterous and surreal to believe. I couldn’t have gone through abuse I didn’t remember, and I couldn’t be a DID system. That was nuts.
Subsequent times the Littles fronted, they began sharing unknown and simplified details about our early CSA trauma.
It fast becomes impossible to deny one’s traumatized, plural reality when your newly overt fronting parts have ages, names, genders, and opinions about things.
Once the system became self-aware, we glacially, over the next six months, accepted that we had DID.
There are still vacillating days when one of us doubts they are part of a system and instead insists that they are a singlet experiencing psychosis, but those days are becoming fewer and farther between.
Since our family was rehoused last fall, many system friends have repeatedly assured us that we are indeed a system.
It has taken almost a year to feel more secure that this is true.
The recent seal of approval by our therapist has also helped those of us who host to accept our new multiplicity paradigm.
However, some progress soon regressed when a pre-teen part fronted and informed us that we were full-on sexually assaulted when we were 11 years old. It wasn’t long before intense doubt crept back in.
Many of our alters were shocked by this revelation. I don’t know why that assault carries more weight for us than molestation does (because both are bodily violations), but somehow it feels worse.
I think it’s because eleven is an age at which one would expect a child to have memories of such an event. That makes it harder to deny it happened.
I guess doubt has returned with a vengeance because we are a system that dissociates most trauma, and the hosts don’t carry those memories; a younger part does.
The doubt is more intense for the hosts because, due to amnesia barriers, there is an odd disconnect with one’s collective narrative.
We had been hoping to get clearer details on when the abuse started, and instead, found out that it had gone on for longer than we’d thought.
We knew intellectually that whole chunks of our life had been blacked out, but being smacked in the face with that knowledge is a horse of another color.
It’s devastating emotionally and yet remains separate and surreal.
One’s body can feel the truth of the statement, and yet the hosts’ portions of awareness cannot compute that so many details have been wiped away.
I don’t feel connected to the assault and have no recovered visual memories of the event, but then I may be a part that formed long after this violation occurred anyway.
The immensity of the moral, ethical, and legal crime committed against us is too heavy to process. The act feels too foreign, like it happened to someone else, because effectively it did.
With every trauma reveal, our doubt that we actually have DID resurfaces. One can more easily deny that the recovered trauma ever happened if one denies that they are a system at all.
Currently, I don’t know all of my repressed trauma, and I don’t know if I ever will. However, before I get frustrated about that fact, perhaps I should consider that our gatekeeper’s actions have kept us safe for decades.
That’s the point of a DID system: the barriers were created to keep the child alive and functioning.
Some of our parts also did not know about the abusive incident that occurred when we were eleven because it was blanked out for their safety as well; however, there may be parts that hold different parts of that same trauma that we do not yet know about.
Realizing that these child parts have held the trauma for decades so that the hosts could carry on free of that burden is excruciatingly sad.
There is so much grief that is multiplied, and one’s trust in one’s version of reality is also on the line. It creates an identity crisis and is very disconcerting.
Unfortunately, I think that the weight and horror of this sudden reveal have sent my co-host into semi-dormancy. She’s overwrought and burnt out from stress, so she is resting and fronts less often now.
We used to share the workload more evenly, but in her absence, I now feel abandoned and overwhelmed.
As we’ve stated, the visual memories we do have of the early abuse are of supposedly benign locations that feel off.
Our body has sent up enough somatic flares that we now know we were assaulted around that time, but because we were so young, we do not have a visual memory to reconstruct what happened.
Like we also said, we have implicit memory that does not leave one with anything but subconscious reactions.
One time, we were so triggered by unexpected CSA content that we were literally launched off the couch in a possible FND attack/alter switch combo that occurred so quickly the momentum caused us to fall on our face with no time to brace ourselves for impact.
We have had body flashbacks while a little co-fronted where it felt like someone unwanted was curled around our body as we lay in bed.
Simultaneously, we also felt like a man was watching us from the bedroom door. It was terrifying for the little, but I was oddly detached even though I could feel all of it as well.
At first, I was anchored enough in the present that I was almost unaffected, but once we started to feel watched, it became terrifying for me as well.
The sensations of having a body pressed against us did not end until sometime after waking the next day. We wanted to scream when it happened, but we couldn’t, and we felt so ill the next day.
I don’t know that I will ever believe the CSA or truly know if we have got it right.
It is not unheard of that parts in a DID system have gotten their abuser’s identity wrong because the truth of who committed the acts was too heinous and horrific for their system to bear.
Perhaps, over time, our hosts will feel more integrated and believe that these CSA memories are true to our experiences.
Perhaps there are more concrete memories that will surface instead of just being left with unfinished narratives.
Perhaps they won’t, and we hosts will be left with the knowledge that something occurred, but will never know exactly what.
Maybe that is a good thing, but not having the answers is confusing and makes one doubt themselves.
I often feel invalid in saying I am a CSA survivor because it all feels secondhand or unsubstantiated. However, denying the CSA also feels wrong and as though I am invalidating and gaslighting my system’s parts.
I can tell that denial hurts the affected alters because the hosts’ denial of our CSA or even our systemhood often plunges us into suicidality.
You can’t get it right in DID except to validate what your alters feel, even if you don’t know if you can accept their truth.
I am not saying they are wrong. I am saying that, having no connection to the memories of the shared events, I don’t currently know in my bones that this version of events is correct.
I feel for my parts. I will always acknowledge their pain, and I have to acknowledge my body’s decades-long stored trauma.
I do the best I can with what I have, and blunder and stumble onward, seeking healing even if I never truly know or understand the truth.
At this point, I don’t know all of the alters who carry hidden trauma, and unfortunately (or fortunately) I won’t likely know for quite some time.
I believe that our gatekeeper alter has decided to keep a temporary tight grip on who switches so that the hosts and our fixer part (who fronts in crises) can better deal with our current housing crisis and the repeated threat of homelessness.
I agree that this decision is the best course of action at this time, but the trauma processing continues for the hosts whether we try to postpone it.
That makes it difficult to protect the Littles if they might be listening in or watching. It makes it hard not to have them feel the grief we are feeling for possibly the first time.
So we hosts are resolved to keep a lid on the processing after we write this essay because we need to be gentler with our alters and with ourselves.
At least until our current crisis becomes more manageable
Unfortunately, because our therapist is not tremendously DID-informed, she and the hosts of our system kind of glossed over important steps with our trauma work: establishing safety, stability, and communication before deeply processing trauma.
Not that we felt we had much choice once the trauma made itself known.
Even writing this essay feels like a betrayal of our unspoken system safety contract, so I have kept details vague so that I might process some of the experience of bewilderment without massively re-traumatizing the alter that shared the information.
I plan to set this trauma aside for now, as best we all can, until the adult alters can better ensure the safety of our systems’ most vulnerable parts.
That doesn’t mean that we will not write about our DID journey at all, but rather that we will not be diving too deeply into the trauma that got us here.
Perhaps we will never share more details about this incident or similar ones that crop up. That is a decision we will have to reach together as a system.
All parts must be heard to move forward with that leg of our journey.
We are multiples, and with multiples, every part of our day is about negotiation, whether conscious or otherwise.
Whether we are communicating with different trains of thought, images, or just relying on mere vibes, we hosts are doing the best we can to get to know each other and our more internal alters better.
Despite my misgivings about sharing a story that isn’t fully mine, I still felt the need to unburden myself through this essay. Just as that middle alter felt the need to lay down some of her burden.
However, starting today, I promise to protect my Littles better.
After almost 5 decades of remaining hidden and holding onto horrors no child should have to carry, they deserve freedom from more betrayal.
They deserve some peace and space to be the sweet and innocent children they always were.
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