age regression and a new alter

I just met a new alter a few hours ago in therapy. Re-met him to be more accurate. I have had several "shifts," in therapy and out, over the past year. I felt like me, the host John alter, just regressed to a younger age. This presence of "my younger self" has happened several times and each time my assessment was -- somehow I just became myself at a younger age. (Isn't this kind of what littles are?) Today I was able to make the distinction when I "shifted" that he actually felt like somebody different and he was an alter.

Now I've known I had DID for sure over a year now, suspected it for over two decades, and welcomed several littles into my life. Even after all that, I'm astonished that I could miss this little guy who had already shown up in the body. Okay, the other littles arrived in a way that made it clear they weren't me and I don't think Carter knew he was an alter or at least he didn't make a point of doing anything other than feeling kind of lonely and sad and young when he was in the body. But still, I am feeling pretty obtuse that I could know I had all these alters and keep thinking that this was some unusual age regression (does this even happen?) and not stop to consider he might be an alter.

He feels the most like me of anyone but it's possible that's because he's been hanging around close to me, like Quato, influencing me for decades probably, and I couldn't make the distinction. A suggestion. If you have anyone you're not sure about or think might be an alter, encourage them to stick around in the body, to walk and do things. He didn't spend enough time in the body before, but he has a distinct feel and he's definitely a child, not me. Also, start talking to someone if you think they might possibly be an alter. Once he started speaking with me, given my DID, I knew he was one of us. I've recommended proactive talking many times but didn't think to apply it in this situation. Doh!

Did he say he has been aware (awake) and near you or has he been off in la la land for a while?

For me it worked to ask the ISH and other alters if there are more out there. I could have never found them all myself. Even with this we had to put out an all points alert on some that were missing since I was a child.

Can you ask him about his history? Sometimes the stories are great!

Thank you for the advice! I have a question - is Carter the newest one, then? If so...and you say he may not have known himself...then I wouldn't beat myself up over being 'obtuse' about it either. If they don't even know who/where they are, how could you? My son's Protector, Alex said in regards to why he looks the way he does "We were there for him and we did what we had to, but he never tried to conceptualize us before. He never tried to give us a form to recognize consciously. So we were, if you will, more like thought clouds. It was not until recently that the forms he chose 'made sense' to him. That is why, the one who is disfigured ... is disfigured. It all means something. To him. That is why he chose these forms. WE...have been here for a very long time."

Back in the 80s there was this movie - Neverending Story...pretty cheesy if you tried to watch it now. BUT - the whole world is destroyed by a 'nothingness'...and the boy of the movie can save the world....but only if he will give the 'princess' of that world a name...they were in darkness. After she was named...the world came to exist.

I know that's way out there....but that's kind of what I see in my son. They Are and Have been..but until he was able to give them a name, they lacked substance and identity in HIS consciousness. What it means to me is that until (the host) was able to connect them to something that made sense in his mind, they couldn't show themselves as individuals in his inner home... If your latest Little one was still trying to figure out how to show you himself or you were trying to put into form something you deep-down knew....could some of the ambiguity come from this process of evolving from the 'one who floats around until needed' to a definite personality with a name?

Atreyu and Bastian!

I watched it a multitude of times - but as an adult.

Did he say he has been aware (awake) and near you or has he been off in la la land for a while?

He doesn't really know. He seems sort of in dreamyland but around. I don't think he's been in hibernation like the others, it feels more like he's impacted emotionally by things and that emotion flows into me and I act on it because it feels like me, I'm so used to it.

My gatekeeper created seven alters, if you include himself in the creation. I created at least seven as well. But mine didn't appear to him as alters, they looked like me. Things they did or things that happened to them looked to him like they happened to me. No wonder he's seemed oblivious about certain problems in our system. As far as I can understand, I started creating alters myself initially because I had made the rule not to "go away," as I knew I could do, in order to stay and protect my little sister. The Sphinx says he offered but I refused, something like that, though it's not like we had a long discussion about it, I was so young. But the abuse was still going on so I had to cope somehow.

There is a difference between the alters the gatekeeper created and the ones I did. There seems to be more total separation from his. It's like I have DID with his alters and something that feels a little less DID with ones I created. Only one of mine was created with an actual name, Marc. Three were created at age four and in a journal entry announced themselves as "John-John, John-John-John and John-John-John-John." They knew they were different and those were their names, but the names are not unique like the others so we changed them. Three others, Carter included, floated up their names and I think they had just chosen them upon discovering themselves to be alters, not just "there."

I'm getting that Carter's emotions are involved in my decision to quit things and, not surprisingly, his emotions feel involved in my suicidal thinking, since suicide is the ultimate quitting. I felt him immediately after I had gone on and on in therapy about suicide and began making the distinction about being a quitter. The experience of wanting/needing to quit things (too generalized but that's what I'm calling it now) is an identifiable pattern in my mind and in life. Once he stepped into the body yesterday, I started wondering what we should call him. I was toying with John variations and I heard "Carter." This is exactly how the names of many of the others arrived, sort of floating up into my consciousness.

HopeIsHere, your focus on the importance of naming (via Neverending Story) as sort of bringing something into being has significant resonance for me now and I'll have to digest that more. Thank you. Coincidentally enough, I suggested Sebastian (Bastian) as an alternative for Carter's name and when I IMed with a friend, she brought up Neverending Story. Where I get the audacity to think I get to override an alter's name is beyond me. I heard Carter after proposing Sebastian. I suggested Cord or Cade as closer to Carter. Again, what was I thinking? I heard Carter. It didn't escape me that Carter sounds like quitter, so maybe he picked the name himself then immediately owned it. Oddly, he himself doesn't feel like a quitter at all, just a nice, hurt kid. But there's something in the dynamic between us that leads me sometimes to want to quit something.

Not surprisingly I had another dream last night of living in a condo that has more rooms than I had thought. I'm always surprised to discover these new rooms down a hallway of my own home I had never checked out before. Sometimes I find doors that open into a neighbor's condo and I have to deal with their reaction to me accidentally entering their space. In this dream, I found an old poor Chinese couple who had been squatting/hiding in a small pantry of mine and I decided to let them keep living there because they had nowhere else to go. Hopefully that was just part of the dream, because I have plenty of alters already, but my instinct not to kick them out seems a good one.

Interesting dreams and very much on par with my own. OO has been much amiss about what is going on inside, but I don't know how much of that has been intentional (he thinks I'm not ready for it) misleading and how much has been ignorance of the sort your talking about.

The Neverending Story is so resonant here. It's interesting that so many others related to that immediately. When we found what OO labeled "the seed" buried in a crypt in a beautiful, but "dead" garden inside, I was told that the only way to get her out (for her to believe she was alive and begin growing) was to give her a name. In the end, Little Yaku ended up picking the name, although I was allowed to decide how I wanted to pronounce it. I'm not sensing any resistance, so I can just say that she got named Hana and I chose the Japanese pronunciation, because that was my major and because it means "flower," so it seemed to fit that she was the seed. I actually wanted to name her Ashlynn, but since LY was the only one who had met her at that point, I went with the name that she picked. I don't know where she got it. She would have only heard of the Biblical version from my JW grandma at best. I can't imagine her having picked the name from there. But, it just fits. It feels right. Hana stays with LY almost all the time. Naming her really did save her from the crypt and spurred on connections inside.

Anyway, I am having similar issues now in that there are either some new splits, some leftovers from a partial integration (is such a thing possible?) or some gaps that are finally being filled in now and it is very confusing how I could have such a "clear" idea of how we are that had been fairly stable for about six months, and suddenly discover different things. OO is no help at all and I can't tell if he is being evasive for my protection (he has done so in the past with my origins, as you know) or if he is just not as all-knowing as he likes to portray himself. He is showing weird images as I say that to try to communicate something like a veil or a sort of sheet or underground areas that can't be seen from his tower right now, so I'm guessing he is making excuses for the latter. Not that he really makes excuses, because he doesn't seem to care how incompetent I find him to be, as he still asserts his "sight" is best, most complete, of all of us inside, and its imperfection is a function of the hardware he is installed on, as I have shared before...

Anyway, I'm glad you are welcoming Carter (LY said "Hi!" when I thought about him and then she got embarrassed and hid) and I hope he feels safe and acknowledged and is willing to share with you now that you can see him more clearly.

J-J I always talk to you and read your messages in awe. You are so aware of things in your system: who created which alter and so on I'm not sure I'll ever get to that degree of understanding. We seem to be bypassing it and just going for the "so how are we going to feel better". Understanding how and why we got this way goes no further than: "someone pretended to die and another alter came through" said by the "font of knowledge" of the system. Maybe I should press for more details but... a part of me really doesn't want to know.

B

a part of me really doesn't want to know.

I think that was me a few decades ago. But a lot of it was I just couldn't figure it out. In any case, I do want to know now. The gatekeeper has told me many times that I have learned what I've learned because I want to know. I have decent relations with my alters because I accept them as us, all of them. I can feel that when things are blocked for me/us, at some level, I still don't want to deal with it or face it. And it's not just me. I can feel other parts of my system not wanting to deal with things either. Yes, I mean you, Jonathan.

I don't even want to live much of the time but I still want to find out what happened, why my life turned out the way it did. The more I learn, the more I find out that deep inside here, I'm a pretty normal guy. My life has been weird and unsatisfying and sad and I've felt kind of crippled and dead much of the time, and so many things just never had an explanation, but it's becoming clear that most if not all of the mess and pain and confusion was a direct result of all the abuse and how I dealt with it. In many ways it's like solving a huge, complex mystery.

I still avoid a lot. I'm using EMDR with the T to push through to stuff and bring it to the present, and it's an awesome aid. But in the very middle of a horrible partial re-experience I am present enough to state that I also am aware that I'm fighting seeing more. I want to learn what happened but I don't want to see it. I want this to be over but I don't always want to push through what I have to do to get there. I don't want to own it at least not all at once. It's one thing to know that my abusers did such and such. To get closer to the actual events is tough and currently that's my battle.

Carter is definitely six but has been in the body with me some at work today and that's not like my other littles. Then again, It feels "normal" in my system that there don't seem to be many universals that fit for everyone. My expectations are often confounded and sometimes I make assumptions that turn out to be quite wrong. This maze I've been journeying through is far more complex than I expected and it's not like I can cheat by flipping to a solution in the back of the book. Because I would if I could.

John wrote:Not surprisingly I had another dream last night of living in a condo that has more rooms than I had thought.

I had a dream like that recently. A tiny cabin in the woods turned out to be the bottom floor of a huge structure, an unlicensed performance art space. Inside a cabinet I found the stairwell. My therapist was so excited.