Learning Love

DID is about survival. It is about having the skills to get through the horror you are living. You learn to adjust, adapt, you develop amazing survival skils. You may however not learn so many things that others take for granted. Things like how to recieve love, how to give love, what real love looks like. How to show love. Things most people do without thinking can take time and effort for a multiple to learn. The greatest of these to learn is deserving love. It is never an easy thing but ultimately worth the work, but it will take time and patience.

Every Day

Every day is so hard. I fight every day to stay alive. I want so much for this all to end, life shouldn't be this hard. We are fighting all the time, there are so many of us and we can never meet everyone's needs let alone wants. It's so complicate. There are no simple answers just many many inside and more trauma than I can recall in one sitting. I don't see it any easier with any of my other friends who have DID. They are all struggling. Every day is a fight. Where is the hope. How can it get better when there are so many of us with stories to tell. It seems never ending and I just don't know where to go from here.

Survivourship Movie

I don't know what to add except this is a very good video. Please watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONGdkCuSiw

What is ritual abuse?

I really haven't written much on here lately as I don't know where to start. Things have just got so much deeper and heavier over the last few months that I am just lost, I have been reading a bit lately and thought I might just quote some information I have found. Be careful it may be triggering. I hope it helps.

From S.M.A.R.T ritual abuse pages

What is Ritual Abuse?

“…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members …most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation” (Pg. 35-36) “Safe Passage to Healing”, by Chrystine Oksana, 1994, HarperCollins, which is an excellent source for survivor and co-survivors on the topic, though there is a newer edition out by iuniverse.com (2001)

 Abuse experiences were reported to have affected every aspect of their adult functioning. Subjects began therapy with little or no knowledge of the phenomenon of ritualistic abuse, and only one patient reported vague memories of ritualistic abuse before entering therapy. Reports from this sample reflect striking convergence among subjects and with data from previous research and clinical reports. A composite clinical case study is presented based on these data.
excerpts from the article:
“Skeptics question the legitimacy of these reports,but many factors point to the reality of the phenomenon of ritualistic abuse. First of all, the degree of consistency between reports of individuals from different parts of the country is very high. The fact that children as young as 2 and 3 report ritualistic abuse experiences that mirror those reported by adult victims is especially striking in light of the fact that young children do not have access to the kind of printed information that might conceivably allow an older person to fabricate such experiences (Gould, 1987). Second, experiences of ritualistic abuse reported by victims of all ages are virtually identical to written historical accounts of Satan worship and the like (Hill & Goodwin, 1989; Russell, 1972), findings that substantiate our present-day understanding of Satanism and ritualistic abuse as intragenerational phenomenon. Third, the symptoms from which individuals reporting histories of ritualistic abuse tend to suffer are consistent with our current understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and the dissociative disorders. The progression in which ritualistic abuse survivors respond to psychotherapy places these victims squarely within the category of individual who have suffered real-not imagined-trauma.
That is, when memories of the dissociated traumatic event have been fully surfaced into conscious awareness and re-associated in all their aspects, the often extremely debilitating symptoms from which the individual has suffered abate dramatically and over the course of treatment frequently disappear altogether (Ray & Reagor, 1991).
Comments on study: Shaffer and Cozolino (1992) interviewed 19 women and one man who reported types and aftereffects of ritualistic abuse consistent with those reported by Young et al. All subjects reported witnessing the murder of animals, infants, children and/or adults. All reported suicidal ideation and half reported suicide attempts. The majority reported severe and sadistic forms of abuse by multiple perpetrators. Some reported continued recontact/revictimization into their adult years.

As a result of the psychologically intolerable nature of their early childhood experiences, victims of ritual abuse frequently develop multiple personality disorder (MPD). Therapists who treat these victims often assume that all MPD stems from a system of spontaneously created defenses against overwhelming trauma. As a result, these therapists tend to focus on treating the post-traumatic stress elements of the disorder and on integrating alter personalities. Recent experience with victims of ritual abuse suggests the presence of “cult-created” multiplicity, in which the cult deliberately creates alter personalities to serve its purposes, often outside of the awareness of the victim’s host personality. Each cult-created alter is programmed to serve a particular cult function such as maintaining contact with the cult, reporting information to the cult, self-injuring if cult injunctions are broken, and disrupting the therapeutic process that could lead to the individual breaking free of the cult. A majority of ritual abuse victims in psychotherapy may maintain cult contact unbeknownst to either the host personality or the treating therapist.

Thats a lot to read so that is all I will add. Yes we are a product of Ritual abuse, a revelation that has taken quite a bit of time to digest. It is shocking but real.