How can this life be real if it doesnt hurt?

Its all we know. We have no memory of anyone ever showing us kindness. A hug, a cuddle, a warm embrace where we felt safe. Nothing never. There was no safe place to hide, every where we went there was hostility and pain. This is the life we know. We know the pain, the shame. When there is no safe place to turn, you can find your home amongst the pain. It becomes the right way to be. It becomes life. It becomes home. Without it things just don't seem right, we feel uncomfortable, like we are wearing the wrong clothes. Constantly fidgeting and feeling unsettled. Until it returns and with its sting, peace. A calmness with its bite. We know it is not good, we know it is not how we should live, but it is all we know. It is not home unless it hurts. Pain is what has damaged us so badly but is also now our friend. To be humiliated, abused, brings us back to what we know how to handle. We know where to go with this, we have the skills and the knowledge to get through it this way. But without the pain we feel empty, alone. We feel numb, like nothing is real. We feel homesick, we long for how we "know" it should be. How we need it to be. They have trained us this way.

Finally its starting to make sense.

Finally things start to make sense. We have been sharing our experiences of trauma with my our mother over the last few months. Hearing about it has triggered a few things in her memory. This morning we managed to put a few pieces together. My father's erratic behaviour now makes perfect sense. Even things that seemed odd to my mother years ago when they happened, now make perfect sense in the light of the information we have given her. We all thought he was just crazy, now we know he is a very intelligent calculating man. But we are putting the pieces together now. Finally it is starting to make sense.

Tired

So tired of being multiple, just so tired as a whole really. It takes so much energy to keep going. Trying to deal with everyone in my head as well as the people I see in the outside world. We went into a second hand shop today and one of our little girls saw a doll she wanted. It looked a bit old and festy and I didn't want to get it. Besides all that, it was way to big for us to discreetly hide in our room. When I said no she got very upset. Dealing with children on the inside and the outside gets a bit much. Some days I wish we could just be one!

Massage

The last few days have been relatively easy in Multiple life. We have been very busy with the outside world. We have been helping a friend set up her Beauty Salon. There has been heaps of painting and cleaning to do and at the end of most days we are exhausted. Today was her grand opening and it was all worthwhile. In all of this, we have not had the desire or the time to focus much on inside. There has been a piece in it, an ease. We have almost felt 'normal'. We have felt like we have hope and that there is a future for us too. We have felt capable and needed. It has been a great feeling. Our friend has set aside a space for us to do massages if we decide to get qualified. It has felt great knowing we could do this and we could be part of society again. But then we wonder, what if like every other course we have done, we cant finish. We start so many and we switch part way through and can't finish. It would be great to have the skills in something even if we cant work at it all the time. Some way to earn money even if it is only part time. We are in the process of gathering information about the course now and then we will just have to see how we go.

Weird Day

Weird day today, Woke up to insiders wanting to make their names known. Found out about 10 new insiders names this morning, and for some of them some information. Cant seem to shake the feeling that life is just not abusive enough at the moment. We are currently living in a very safe environment and we do not often feel afraid or threatened. We do not have sex if we don't want to, and if we do, we don't often feel shamed, dirty and cheap, like we used to. I think that is the problem. We are not in abusive relationship at the moment and we feel like we have some power and control. We really don't know how to handle that. It has left us feeling unsettled. We need bad things to be happening, this is the world we know. We don't really know what to do when we feel safe. We haven't mastered happy. Although there are insiders who can feel happy, most of us don't really know how that feels. We just fake it. It all feels overwhelming.
We have also been dealing with feelings that we can do nothing right. Everything we try to do is wrong and we just might as well just give up on life.
Although on an opposing note, this morning whilst chatting to the new insiders, we had a bit of a revelation. When meeting new insiders there are always a lot of questions. Someone inside pointed out that if we don't live long enough, we will never know the answers to all the questions we have about our system. We need to live to find the answers and to tell the truth about our life. It gave us purpose when we are floundering in knowing why we are even here. We need to get the truth out there. We need people to know.

Understanding Our System

Life has been very stressful for all of us lately, in so many different ways. Just realising we are now 200 and not the 30-40 we thought, has changed so much for us. We now look at ourselves so differently, we have to. We realise we have a near endless supply of resources inside us and if we need someone to be able to perform a task,  we now ask inside to see if we have that person hidden in there somewhere. They are usually there. We are starting to see ourselves as more of a family.
 It is immeasurably hard and confusing. There are so many of them that want to be heard. Some days it is overwhelming and I must ask for only a few to talk at a time as I just cant cope with so many of them at once.
A few weeks ago I heard one of us saying she had had enough and didn't want to be an alter any more. I really didn't know what she meant by that at first. How does she stop being what she really is? After a talk with Diamonds we realised what the problem is.
You see the term 'Alter" is a term created by the medical profession to be able to communicate effectively about DID. It is the shortened version of Alternate Personality. All very well and good from a medical or Psychological perspective. But when you are one of these 'Alters', it infers you are just a part of a person. A piece broken from the 'main or core' personality. This may indeed be true for many people with DID. I know of many that have this Main or core personality, but it is not true for us. We do not work like this, we don't have a core person, nor a main person. Quite simply WE ARE MANY.
When you look at our body you do not see one body one person. Instead you see one body many people. We grow up in a singleton world where the standard issue is one body one person. We are not one of these people, we are many living in this one body, which at times can seem a little over packed. Its about changing how you see things. Instead of Alters we needed to find a word that expressed who we are. Many people in one body, not alternate personalities. Instead of Alter we now refer ourselves as 'Insiders', and those not in our body as 'Outsiders'. It fits well and we seem comfortable with the change.
I hope that this helps people to come to terms with the idea, that we are not merely one person who has these pesky alters, but many people living in one body. We are all equal and we work together as best we can to make it work. We come as a group.

Do We Deserve This?

One of the hardest things to deal with is the feelings that we deserve what happened to us. Even now as an adult do we deserve the things that happen to us now. When good is happening, we struggle to know how to cope, we feel uncomfortable, unsettled. When things turn bad, there is a comfort there. The same goes for things like self harm. Not just cutting, but also putting ourselves in a situation that we know is going to be harmful so it will hurt. Wanting someone to physically hurt us so we will feel like we deserve to feel. Wanting to smash our arm against a wall to break it so we can feel the pain. Some how we need it to hurt because we believe we deserve it to hurt. This is our life, if it doesn't hurt then it isn't right. It is the only world we know. There has to be pain. It is the only way things feel right in the world.

Welcome to My life!!

Broken, Abused, Hurting Souls (Trigger warning: Child abuse)

Today like many days before, we have become overwhelmed by life as a multiple. Trying to get 200 insiders ( now what we are calling Alters) to work together and build a life in a world made for singletons seems impossible. Relationships seem impossible. How do people understand us? How do we understand ourselves? How do we ever get through life when all we see is trauma and abuse every where we turn.
As we were driving along in the car, we ran through in our head, what has happened to us step by step something changes. Actually we yelled it out.
" Don't judge me, if you too had been repeatedly sexually assaulted from before the age of 3 years old, hypnotised into compliance, so that many men can have their way with you. Shared through a paedophile ring, prostituted out. Locked in a cage, with your dying friend as her blood runs across the floor towards you. Beaten, raped, tied to a bed during sex. Choked, drowned, just to mention a few things, then you too would be a little stressed about life."
Strangely after saying that in the car and even after repeating it now as I type, a sense of calm comes over us. Some of the stress is released. There is a reason life is so hard to navigate. There is a reason we struggle so much with love and relationships. We learnt about the very worst of mankind, we learnt abuse, rape, death and hatred before we were old enough to even understand love. It makes sense but does it mean we will ever really be able to make a life for ourselves that is safe, and good and fun. Will our past haunt us forever. Is it possible to ever let it go when you live as many broken abused hurting souls?