Talking about Childhood Abuse and Dissociative Identity Disorder. *possible triggers*

For years I have kept quiet about this, probably because I think I have finally and completely escaped all those people from my past.
I have recently been referred by my GP to see a Mental Health Nurse and the MH Nurse seems to think that I may have DID (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder). During the appointment he started to talk to me about my life growing up and that certain conditions are caused by being trapped and subjected to repeated episodes of abuse going on for years.

I will now share some of the things I have remembered and typed up from my laptop. I hope this doesn't trigger anyone who is feeling vulnerable and mentally wobbly.

The Mental Health Nurse says that the seizures and other symptoms like headaches, detached dream-like states, rapid mood changes, euphoric existence, out of body experience are symptoms of this.

He talked to me about getting a book to read about Depersonalisation and gave me some paperwork.
A Screening Test for Dissociative Identity Disorder and a longer questionnaire that had different sections in it. Some of the sections were about schizophrenia symptoms, childhood abuse, depressive episodes, supernatural experiences, borderline personality symptoms and a few other sections.

After spending the past few days thinking about this and trying to remember things from the past, I now realise that there might be some truth to this. It could be more than what I thought was going on which was Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Perhaps I am having Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures and dissociating from the world around me and detaching from myself.

I have remembered a few things from my early childhood to my mid to late teenage years that were either abuse, neglect or really strange supernatural experiences. I hope I don't traumatise anyone but I feel the need to share what I have remembered.

Memories of Abuse, Neglect and Strangeness.



Childhood.
I remember my Mother chasing me into the back garden of the property where we lived. I think she was angry and chased me because I had ruined some clothing with a paintbrush loaded with white spirits. She was so angry that I thought she would kill me if I let her catch me. I was trapped at the end of the back garden with a wooden fence behind me and a climbable tall fence into the next garden. I just wanted to get away from her and remember alternating between looking at her and looking at the fence. I think I was around the age of 5 or 6 at the time.

While I was playing with the two girls who lived next door to me, I remember that they suddenly got scared and they ran to a bedroom and barricaded the door to stop their brother coming it. I didn’t understand why they were scared of their brother as they were both bigger and older than him and there were two of them and only one of him. There was also a few other strange things over at that house didn’t make sense to me like using a bucket as a toilet and sitting on the floor to eat food instead of sitting on a chair with the plate of food on a table.

I think my Dad walked out on my Mother and I when I was 5 leaving her to look after me by herself.


Whilst I was with my Aunty staying at her place, she had a rather dramatic and explosive meltdown which was directed at me. She sad that I was evil and had the Devil inside of me. That I was doing things to her, stressing her out so much that she was going to die.

After coming back home from Brownie camp my Mother told me the guinea pig had died. Did he really die from worms or did she neglect to feed and look after him in order to see me get upset and cry? Sadist? I don’t remember her hug me or try to comfort me. I think she might have been trying to stop herself from smiling. Her gaze seemed to focus on my face, was she excited and in anticipation of seeing me cry?

Whilst I was at my Aunty’s place I had an accident making her a cup of tea and scolded my leg quite badly. Later on my Father took me to an amusement park and let me go on the rides there despite having a massive blister on my leg from the recent scolding from the boiling hot water from the kettle. The ride caused the blister to bust and increased the pain I was already in. Afterwards I remember being taken to hospital. I think my Father was angry at me as the Doctor who dealt with me seemed concerned and abit angry at my Father.


While I was at Primary School I was friends with a girl who was in foster care. Looking back she might have been a manipulating liar. Turning a game of chase tag into a drama where I was chasing after her trying to attack her and kill her. She made some of the teachers and other pupils believe that I had done this.
I remember sleeping overnight in the same bed as my Aunty which was rather odd, I think there was a bed elsewhere in the house for me to go sleep in.

Whilst on holiday at Center Parcs with my Aunty and her friends I remember her getting angry with me and dragging me out of the bath. I focused on going off by myself during the daytime to avoid her. Hiding in the plunge pool

When I was 11 or 12 I left my Mother and when to live with my Father as I thought things might be better with him. I remember my Mother crying her eyes out over the ironing board the day I left. She probably felt very alone and abandoned.

Teenage Years

Both parents tried to use me as a weapon against the other by telling me horrid things about each other. It was like I was an shiny object that they were both wrestling over to gain control of.

Stuck living with my Father who didn’t really want me to me to be there. With me living at his flat made having lady friends over difficult. It was arranged that I regularly spend long weekends staying over at my Aunty’s place to give him a break from having to deal with me on top of the full-time job he had to deal with.

One time when I was Secondary school I forgot my keys and left them in the flat. I rang my Father when I realised and he said that I had to wait outside until he got back home from work. He went to the pub after work and I waited until he came back home in the later evening.


Both my Father and my Aunty had told me on numerous occasions that I was just like my Mother. That I was stupid, useless and that I wouldn’t amount of much.

I think my Father wanted me to drop out of school and focus on earning money to give him and cook and clean for him.

A number of times my homework or project that I had to hand in at School disappeared from my school bag despite me knowing that I put in my bag and checking the night before that it was in my bag ready to hand in. Either I was very silly and forgetful or my Father was going into my bedroom and removing it from my schoolbag and then putting in back in my bag after I came back from School.

My Aunty was a rather strange person who switched from a lovely, sociable, chatty warm person in public around people to a dark, critical person when she was alone with me back at her home. Jekyll and Hyde.

On one particular weekend my Father wanted me out of the flat as a friend was going to come over. On that weekend my Aunty was also going on a foreign holiday and couldn’t be available for me to stay at her place. My Mother was AWOL and had her phone switched off. In my mind I faced the prospect of being out of his flat at the weekend and having nowhere to sleep. I thought I was going to have to go and sleep under a bridge somewhere by myself. Luckily my Father begrudgingly cancelled his plans and let me stay the weekend at his place.

While I was staying over at my Aunty’s place she used to pick out what clothes and make-up she wanted me to wear, styled my hair in the way she thought was best and was very critical if I tried to dress and look differently

After she retired from work she seemed to put quite alot of her time and energy into helping her elderly Aunty and the husband of her Aunty. She got me to help quite a lot as well by sending me down with food or water the garden when they were caravanning. The elderly couple didn’t like me very much.

Whilst I was living at my Father’s place, my Aunty would regularly ring his phone to talk to me and get me to drop whatever I was doing/had planned to go and do errands for her. Like going to town and doing her shopping for her and then going back again to the same shop as I got the wrong size lettuce or something trivial like that. Anything to keep me busy and stressed enough that I couldn’t focus on more important things like school projects and revising for GCSE exams. I remember one summer’s day when I was alone in my Father’s flat and my Aunty was ringing the landline on and off for about an hour and an a half to try and tell me what she wanted me to do for her.

While I was living at my Father’s flat I rang Childline once to try and talk to someone about what was going on. The person who I ended up talking to probably thought I was making stuff up to get attention and told me not to ring up again. I never rang Childline again or bothered to tell anyone about what was going on. If the person at Childline didn’t want to listen to me and believe me then nobody else would believe me.

My Father used to take the Child Benefit money on a regular basis and use it for his pub fund. He said I was naughty and this was my punishment in the form of a financial penalty. He took my stuff to give to the children of the woman he was currently dating to impress her by buying the affection of the children. I needed that money to buy food at school and other things. Because of that I had to rely on money from my Aunty and steal from the copper and 5p boxes my Father’s room when he was at work.
My Father would make comments on how messy I was making his flat despite most of the mess being caused by him. I think he wanted me to start to take care of his flat for him.

During the first year or two of being at Secondary School my Aunty sent me around to my Mother’s flat with some food and stuff. I remember that the flat was in a complete state with carrier bags of rubbish piled up in the living room. I think this was went she had a breakdown of some kind because of problems she was experiencing at work. Empty bottles I think was drinking.

After I left Secondary School I got a job at a fast-food chain, during the time that I worked there someone rang in sick for me despite me already on the premises working. Was someone trying to get me to lose my job?
I helped my Mother to get a job whilst I worked there, not long after that my Father and his current girlfriend regularly turned up whist I was on shift at same time that my Mother was working and caused trouble.

When I was a child I had a pet rabbit, he was living at my Aunty’s place. Leverage over me to make sure I kept going over to her place to see my rabbit. The rabbit probably died of a heart attack due to my Aunty feeding him chocolate digestive biscuits on a regular basis. Fat Bunny.

Whilst I was in college the rabbit died after this I packed my bags while my Father was out of the flat and went over to my Mother’s flat. I waited outside her flat for hours until she eventually realised I was outside and let me in. Her phone was off and I couldn’t contact her beforehand to let her know I was coming over. I didn’t know of anywhere else I could go at the time other than back to my Mother.

Adulthood.

In the months after I walked out of my Father’s flat he would come round to my Mother’s flat to bang on the door and scream and shout. Harassment and angry verbal abuse. We kept quiet to make him think we were out and avoided opening the front door.

Trapped living with my Mother in the flat that she rented. She was dysfunctional alternating between wanting to play the child role making me the responsible adult who took care of things and looked after her needs to wanting to be the boss and pushing me out of the role of the responsible adult.

In the first few years living back with my Mother we were both drinking and later on that night she switched on me. She got really angry and started raging and throwing empty vodka bottles in my direction. I ran into my bedroom, slammed the door. I sat down on the floor with my feet planted against the end of the long unit in my bedroom to stop her from opening the door and coming after me.
She threw a few more vodka bottles at my bedroom door while I was using myself to block and keep the door shut.

On occasions when I was getting ready to leave the flat to attend an appointment or do something that didn’t involve her she would try to stall me to keep in the flat for longer regardless of whether it would cause me to be late or miss the appointment or arrangement I had to attend. I ended up having to lie to her about the details of appointments because of this.

She was rather moody and controlling, she wasn’t happy with me wanting to learn all the things I needed to learn to live independently. Everytime I offered to wash the clothes she would come up with excuses, get moody, give me the silent treatment and leave the room.

She was happy for me to cook the food in the kitchen for both of us to eat while she sat in her armchair in front of the TV in the living room. A few times she would get the stool and sit and watch me cook the food like a young child watching her mother and waiting for the food to be ready.

She had no friends and never went out anywhere to socialise with other people. She would rarely go out to the local supermarket or up town shopping by herself, most of the time she went out it was with me going with her. On occasion she would either go into a mood, try to stall me or get me to put off going out of the flat to go up town without her.

Over the years that I lived with my Mother I noticed that at times she would slide into child-like behaviour and way to talking.

I found communicating with her difficult as she would evade/restrict her communication with me, so I never knew whether or not she was really listening to what I had said or understood what I meant.
Endless circular conversions leading into arguments. I hated having to go over the same things again and again with her but I think she quite liked it as she probably got quite stimulated by the intense drama of it and the attention she got from me over it. It didn’t matter to her how exhausting, frustrating and crazy it was making me.

I felt like I was trapped as the only way I could leave was if I already had a full-time stable job to rent privately. I wanted to be free to get a full-time job and move out but had the responsibility of taking care of my Mother dumped on me. I was also afraid that she would sabotage me trying to move out and leave her.

I ended up taking on the responsibly for doing job search and meeting her JSA targets for her due to her literacy problems, anxiety and depression. Her literacy problems and inability to do things for herself appeared to fluctuate with her mood. In the end I sat her down and told her that if her anxiety and depression are that bad then maybe she should discuss the issues with her GP. She did and little while later she came off JSA and went on ESA.

Put in the position by my Mother to take on the responsibility of holding everything together or face the consequences of having little money if she had her money stopped and being evicted along with her as I was living under her tenancy with no eligibility to be housed by the Council if I was to be made homeless.

A number of times I had to take charge and deal with my Mother’s threats to go off and kill herself if I didn’t help her and take care of her responsibilities for her.

She seemed happiest when I was doing things for her and giving her attention and praise when she wanted it.

From a very early age my life has been one battle or crisis after another. Life has been a lot of hard work to keep on the good sides of the only people in my life who I had to depend on to survive. Hard work with no end and no reward.

The only meaningful relationship I think I had ever had was with my pet rabbit and I think that my Aunty realised that. I think that is why she feed him chocolate biscuits so often in order to make him really unwell in the hope he would die soon and leave me all alone.

I had a stormy friendship in Secondary School with the girl from my Primary School who made people believe that I was trying to hurt or kill her. Looking back now I didn’t really see what she was doing.
Somehow I think that she had the ability to see inside my head and manipulate me without me realising or me seeing what she was doing. I ended up being friends with her on and off during Secondary School.

From what I remember she was in foster care and was in Art Therapy for issues relating to being abused by family members. She had no friends her own age in the same year, she was friends with pupils who were in younger years. She came out with some pretty strange and shocking things like being attacked by a ghost and ending up pregnant with a ghost baby to holding a Ouija board session in the school library and telling a girl in our year that the girl’s recently deceased grandmother had communicated with her. In the first year of college she attempted to continue our friendship.

She borrowed money off me twice and claimed that she didn’t when she borrow from me for a third time. She knew how to manipulate the teachers at that school, she behaved and said the right things in the right way to make them believe that what she was saying what the truth. She was skilled at playing the victim to get teachers and the younger students to side with her and protect her.

There was one time where a boy in our year was winding her up for a laugh, this caused her to totally flip out and she chased him all around the school. I think she went totally red mist crazy and lost control.

This section below is mainly about how I feel about some of the people in the medical profession and how I think they view me.

Now that I am away from all of them and not constantly busy trying to keep them happy I do feel empty and dead inside sometimes. I have no choice in telling you this as I don’t you along with everyone else in the medical profession will think that I am a malingerer who is making stuff up for sympathy and financial gain. Having to open up and get help from people like you who view me with suspicious and distain due to thinking I am trying to play the system. The feeling is mutual I view people like you in the same way as I feel that you view me. If I express any emotions they will probably be viewed as an attempt to emotionally manipulate people.

I don’t think I have had any close long-term friendships in my life. I never made friends with anyone while I was living with my Mother. I feel that deep down people aren’t to be trusted. Whatever information I give will be twisted and used against me.

All I can say is your strong and I hope you are living in your own way now. The main focus of life is to live your life and not that of others, specialy if you personaly find those others lives degrading. Live to your standards, its your life. Best wishes to you.

a reply to: DivineEuphoria

Your story is so scarily similar to mine (beside the girlfriend ghost story) I would replace only a few words

I have plenty to say yet nothing, I just always said I am not a product of my parents full stop

There was a moment the most ..... one, few days into when I started school, the one at 6, mum did the whole dress up thing ( for next part I want to upfront add my pain threshold is so low nothing really hurts me at all, yet one thing that does and I really hate it is when people touch my skin and touch my hair) so she was brushing my hair in front of mirror and I flinched (I didn't say a word just flinched) we were staring at each other in the mirror she grabbed my hair into her wrist and was going to smash my face in the mirror we were standing too far for me to hit it .. She slapt me across my face when I was 5 because a cupboard fell on me almost squish me ( my grandma did the same she pushed me accidentally in fire, at 13 my uncle too cause I didn't believe his alien story just a quick ad on) and so frikin on and on and on .. I don't know who these people are, complete disattachment I have not met one person who has not disappointed me, well one but I am yet to see who they are. To the very first post the "symptoms" you are describing in my opinion a result of all of that experience and more "spiritual or what you call it" ( it happened to YOU for a reason to make you who you are now) but I am no doctor so I also say how about MRI or prescription

I hope I see you around

Thank you oh so very much for opening up with us, my doctor always says talking about the abuse i lived as a kid will help me to heal, im still working on it, and damit i nearly live a normal life these days.

I believe every word.

I, too, am unbelievable apparently.
So I know what that's like.

And I'm so sorry that you had to go through all of that.

You've got a nice flow about you.

What I am currently learning in my journey of healing (ha!), is that no man is an island. We are all entangled and we need one another. We all will also influence one another no matter what we do, we can't escape that. So your thread inspired me and influenced me, but you did not manipulate me. Furthermore, it's ok to feel bad about things that are, well, bad... it's just appropriate. I think at some point recently I even realized it's ok for people to feel sorry for me(or even feel sorry for certain things that happened/happen to anyone) because imagine a world where no one ever felt sorry, for anything or anyone... Honestly. I think more people should feel sorry and be stirred to feel compassion.

I'm so glad you shared as much as you did. I hope you have the vision to see a better, more positive future where we all influence one another to feel better instead of feel worse, srsly!

Hello there,
It must have taken alot of courage to put all of this out here, you are a very brave person and you should be very proud of yourself. I have not got DID but in the last 2weeks have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, Im not entirely sure if they are similar but i hope finally having someone listen and understand not to mention give you a name of all these feelings or thought pattens you may have been experiencing a name and that you are not alone. I know i found it a relief to get diagnosed and finally realising i cant help the way i think sometimes its normal of people with BPD.
I thind that talking helps im usually quite a private person but sharing my past with this psychiatrist helped ALOT and have come to realise my parents are narcissists.
This was probably the cause of my BPD. Im nothing like my parents who are judgemental narrow minded people. Im the black sheep of the family, Ive never had any close friendships growing up and still dont, Except my husband who is my best friend.
Before i found him i never realised i was "sick" and was constantly being rejected by friends/family.
Now im living a bit of a normal life lol.

a reply to: DivineEuphoria
I am not one for emotions but this is a very saddening post.

Perhaps I have spent too much time with psychologist friends, but it sounds like your mother (and perhaps even father) were abused too. Your mother seemed to be reliving her childhood and desired to make the world revolve around her, terrible 2s sort of deal. Your father seemed to like having a scapegoat to blame his life on. Your aunt and neighbour girls may have suffered similar fates too...

I wish you well in the future.

originally posted by: geezlouise
I believe every word.

I, too, am unbelievable apparently.
So I know what that's like.

And I'm so sorry that you had to go through all of that.

You've got a nice flow about you.

What I am currently learning in my journey of healing (ha!), is that no man is an island. We are all entangled and we need one another. We all will also influence one another no matter what we do, we can't escape that. So your thread inspired me and influenced me, but you did not manipulate me. Furthermore, it's ok to feel bad about things that are, well, bad... it's just appropriate. I think at some point recently I even realized it's ok for people to feel sorry for me(or even feel sorry for certain things that happened/happen to anyone) because imagine a world where no one ever felt sorry, for anything or anyone... Honestly. I think more people should feel sorry and be stirred to feel compassion.

I'm so glad you shared as much as you did. I hope you have the vision to see a better, more positive future where we all influence one another to feel better instead of feel worse, srsly!

Wow, that is such a nice thing to say that I have a nice flow about me.

On a logical level I understand some of what you say, but it's a hard thing to think about as I just end up thinking that people who feel sorry for people secretly view me a pathetic and inadequate in some way. Perhaps because of the popular view that I think that society has of a what a person is and what kind of background and up-bringing a good hard-working person is. The ideal person much valued by society who is a professional, well-balanced person who gets on with everyone and has no issues that will get in the way of work or what others expects of them.

The extreme ends of different people viewed by society either you are nut from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's nest or you are clean, tidy and functional both in the physical and mental way.

originally posted by: SargonThrall
a reply to: DivineEuphoria
I am not one for emotions but this is a very saddening post.

Perhaps I have spent too much time with psychologist friends, but it sounds like your mother (and perhaps even father) were abused too. Your mother seemed to be reliving her childhood and desired to make the world revolve around her, terrible 2s sort of deal. Your father seemed to like having a scapegoat to blame his life on. Your aunt and neighbour girls may have suffered similar fates too...

I wish you well in the future.

I think that you might be right there. I have some curiosity to find out what went on in their family lives but that might not be such a good idea. My Mental Health Nurse raised some interesting point about whether they have any obsessional tendencies that urges them to harass and stalk. I think that if I was to contact my Father or My Aunty that I could trigger them off to pursue me until I let them back into my life and have relationships with them. The kind of relationships I think they would probably want is one-sided where I do stuff for them and submit to them and give everything inside me to try to fill them up. You can't fill up a bucket with holes in it, you can try and spend your life in the failure of the quest.

Recently I have had a dream where I was a ghost in the past observing what I thought were the younger selves of my Aunty (Mother's sister) and some of the family on My Mother's side of the family. The dream made me wonder if anything inappropriate happened between the sister and the father of the sister. Whether my Aunty was really my Aunty or whether she was my Grandmother. My Father over the years has said that he isn't my Father. Maybe he is telling the truth.

From some of the things my Mother has told me about her Father he seemed like quite an evil, cruel man. I wonder did he do things to his children which people are only supposed to do with other adults?

I always find it interesting when people experience
what the Bible explains in great detail. After perusing
your other postings I'm under the impression someone
in your family has delved into the occult.

Most people have no idea when dealing with the occult
they open their future descendants to demonic activity.

Many years ago Mental health practitioners who were
not based in Biblical dynamics started to call demonic
activity 'Multiple Personality Disorder'. Now they are
calling it Dissociative Identity Disorder.

I've read some of the mind-splitting theory of
consciousness under trauma. Which is nothing more
than science fiction & sophistry of the medical
profession to misdirect people from the truth of what
Christ taught about demonic activity over 2000 years ago.

It's a shame so many are driven to drugs and alcohol,
and even suicide. Unfortunately until such people get
desperate to forego the shenanigans of psycho-therapy,
are they rarely ever able to attain a balanced level of
mental stability. Then, they seek those qualified to
simply cast the evil spirits out.

Unfortunately such a simplistic solution will not avail
the majority of help, as their pride convinces them
otherwise that Christ was right.

I wish you well.

It almost feels like, if I'm able to succeed/do well in my life on the most basic surface levels (I don't do drugs, I'm not in great financial debt- yet, and even if I plan on going into further debt I fully hope to be able to afford it and pay it off, etc.), then maybe I'm not feeling as suicidal or bad as I thought I was? And I think that's in part what makes me unbelievable in particular. Like if I was really traumatized, well then shouldn't I look like it?

The other day someone told me that if everything I said was true then I should be dead or struggling (suicide, or drug addicted)... and even though the past couple of years have been some of the darkest years of my entire life (not counting the traumatic period in my youth) I still somehow have a GPA of 3.75 (and that will go up this semester I think) and I paid off my car loan fully and I kept up with other bills and insurances and also I haven't had any complications managing my new health condition (I was recently diagnosed with an auto-immune disease called Type 1 Diabetes where my body just randomly started to attack my pancreas, so now I have been manually juggling my blood sugar levels for almost three years without any seizures or further hospitalization) and there's more responsible stuff that makes me look like a semi (relatively decent actually) functioning adult...

So I think we can be mentally ill and even suicidal and evil and monstrous on the inside in private, but still fully functioning on the surface level. So it's not one or the other for me, it's definitely both. It's all at once simultaneously. It's a lot of compartmentalization which to the extreme kind of resembles DID. And I think the more fully functioning you are on the outside... the less believable your inner insanity becomes to other people. I feel like people never feel sorry enough, cause they're largely unbelieving. The darker parts are literally invisible to people as long as you look fine on the outside; appearance alone really matters/counts. If your hair is brushed. If your clothes are clean, etc.

But then, how far do you go to prove to someone else how broken you really are? I've only gone as far as talking, tbh. I mean I've done some things, I've withdrawn socially, I've kicked in cabinet doors and destroyed some things in the house during specific episodes, and I've trolled some internet places, etc. But for the most part I've just talked... and that's not proof of anything.

I rarely tell people how I really feel anymore but when I have, it's like they are literally incapable of believing like they can't help but think I'm lying for some reason- even if it's something stupid like a story about an ex-boyfriend or how I won an award on my third eye head bust one semester (even though there are pictures of it) and etc. I just look too normal or something. I've just decided I'm unbelievable and also I'm wrong all the time. Can't do anything about it, apparently. Radical acceptance, I got this down to a science.

And I'll write about it all and share it with everyone and call it a fiction cause people can't stomach the reality. And I'll secretly hope the hateful and judging audience is reading and that will only make me all the more passionate about what I'm really trying to say.

I've got no shame left. I'm tired of shame. I'm working on my revenge now.

But anyway, I hope you're feeling better and I read somewhere around here that everything in a dream is supposed to represent yourself, even other characters in your dream. Even houses and landscapes represent yourself.

Please keep writing and sharing! Whenever you should feel compelled, etc. And I'm sorry for using your thread as an opportunity for me to rant. Just tell me to shut up and I'll do it, for real!