At what age did your abuse start?

Category Triggers

I think I get what you are saying and the idea is right, but I think these specifics will help you fine tune your thoughts. That is if I have it all right. I think I do, but I am no expert.

Splits can occur but this is not the initial process. First we start out "split" so to say and we need to integrate.

The normal brain will develop ego states. We don't think of that as splitting, but it is still parts of the Self such as an alter is. I think, as you stated, that it is easier when young to make various parts of the Self. Those with DID can still develop ANP throughout life, but I doubt they develop EP's after childhood..

You are correct in that we're all just neuron pathways.

Let me add this and you can see that indeed parts of the self are functioning as a child. Now weather they are splitting or not I am not sure. If they are - then it still remains that we started out "split" rather than one "integrated self." I am not sure more than that is really known.

DID can happen because a very young child, who has usually been neglected and abused can dissociate and leave another part of themselves there with the abusers to take the punishment. As a result, the actual abused child, the host, usually has no memory of the abuse. The emotional parts or child-like alters hold all the trauma memories and those parts of the mind did endure and remember the abuse.


I will send what I wrote to my LC. He LOVES to correct my errors.

though i dont recall when it started for me, my mom has told me stories of my early childhood with her boyfriend. the abuse started for me before i was out of diapers. which lasted with several abusers til i was 15 years of age. to this day i still have a hard time believing anything i ever went through was severe as i tend to minimize any form of abuse. i remember at age 10 during my stay in the womens shelter i was told i was being abused and was in complete denial. as it was everyday normal life for me. even to this day amnesia is a big problem for me though after accepting d.i.d is what has happened .. i seem to lose less time and im more co conscious now. though my mother never admitted her part in it, which i know she had a hugh role.i will never receive closure i think unless i remember. i pretty much know she had a hugh role from the feelings i have about her, also one of my introjects is her. which to me is living in hell. i cant seem to get away. i moved across the country to get away from her to realize i spend everyday with her. worst feeling in the world. ive heard many theories around d.i.d but the one i liked the most was ..d.i.d cant be a disorder since the original person wasnt there to have a mental diagnoses. when the person left the body the brain in a life or death situation created alter egos so the body could substain life. for without a person in the body ..the body would die. so the brain creates alternatives to continue life. in a way it makes sense but many have their own take of how and why it develops. i got this information from this link. http://www.dissociation.com/index/definition/ it goes into better detail then what i have described. but like i said its just one in many ideas around it.

One of the things that I am aware of is that my relationship with my mother did act as a protective factor for me. I have always known that she loves me. Now, she came from an abusive family, never had good parenting modeled for her, and has always avoided looking at, never mind dealing with, her own wounds. As a result, she failed miserably at protecting me from relatives who were clearly not to be trusted and I am sure that she was otherwise unable to provide the environment that would have fully allowed me to form a secure attachment with her. So I grew up in a very odd combination of love and neglect. To this day, my mother is unable to deal with the pain and difficulties that the abuse has created. She will e-mail me, asking how I am doing, I will tell her that things are really hard and "I am currently in survival mode" and she won't acknowledge what I have said with a single word. It really is pretty crazy making. And yet, otherwise, she is very caring and supportive. I am still trying to work out how to have a relationship with her that will allow me to be real and true to myself, and yet allow me to have as much connection as is possible.

I am very grateful that I was not born into the family that my father was born into. I shudder to think what it would have been like to be a girl in that house. Based on my experiences, it would clearly have been an environment that would have facilitated the development of DID.

tylas wrote:Category Triggers

DID can happen because a very young child, who has usually been neglected and abused can dissociate and leave another part of themselves there with the abusers to take the punishment. As a result, the actual abused child, the host, usually has no memory of the abuse. The emotional parts or child-like alters hold all the trauma memories and those parts of the mind did endure and remember the abuse.

From my experience, I would say that this doesn't just happen with DID. This exactly describes my experience, and yet I do not have DID. My kids absolutely hold the memories and I had no memory of the abuse until I started experiencing flashbacks in my early 20s. I look back and see a pattern of dissociation and behaviors that were a result of the abuse earlier in my life, but there was a complete lack of memory. The child parts who hold the memories took an immense amount of damage for me. I am convinced that if I had not been able to repeatedly split off parts of the worst of the experiences, I could not have retained my sanity.

I am currently doing a second round of therapy, after taking off several years to essentially live life and get stronger. During that period of time, my kids went quiescent, except for periods of extreme stress due to perceived threats, and they once again held the memories of the abuse away from me. During this period, I knew that I had been abused and remembered bits and pieces of what I had worked on, but I forgot all of the worst stuff until I started doing therapy again. When I started to get flashbacks of things a few months ago, I really thought that I was finally getting some clear information for the first time about things that I had only had vague suspicions of before. It was only through reading old journals and talking to my T that I discovered that no, those same things had been pretty clear to me before, I just couldn't actually deal with them before. I remember almost nothing of about 3 years worth of therapy. It is actually really an odd experience, having things come up, struggling to tell my T about them, thinking that it is the first time that she has heard it, and then finding out that I told her before.

So, in my experience, you can have amnesia for matters related to the abuse (both at the time and as an adult), child parts who take the abuse experience for you, and abuse that starts at a young age and continues over a period of years and eventually becomes extremely traumatic by age 10, but not have DID.

Cat's Meow, are you saying you don't have DID? You do have parts correct? Do you term it something different?
One thing I will say from my own experience, I definitely formed a split at age 15. I am absolutely sure of this. As I said my abuse started at 5 but different trauma happened at 15 and I still split, which I am surprised I could even do at that late age.

p1415926 wrote:Cat's Meow, are you saying you don't have DID? You do have parts correct? Do you term it something different?

Yes, I don't have DID and I do have parts. Other than a brief discussion on why I don't have DID, my T and I haven't really discussed current diagnosis (there is way too much for me to do in my sessions for me to waste time on it,) however I am somewhere in the DDNOS area of the dissociative spectrum. My parts are not as separate and not as stable as in DID. I am rushed at the moment, so here is a link to a posting where I more fully described my experience: dissociative-identity/topic89890-40.html

I am going to start a new thread about the many questions that are not related to the first post.

dissociative-identity/topic90241.html

Earliest abuse I know if started at five. Before then they tell me I was a completely different little girl. Not a care in the world, never moody, bright. After the abuse I changed majorly. Every time since when other trauma occurs I continue to change. I hate that.

AliceWolfe wrote:Before then they tell me I was a completely different little girl. Not a care in the world, never moody, bright. After the abuse I changed majorly.

Me too. I've always felt like I'm not the person I was supposed to be. It's sad (Sorry, off topic, but your post struck a chord with me.)

As far as we can discern, abuse from the mother started very young, probably soon after birth. I tasked my gatekeeper with estimating what happened beyond what he was sure of and he describes three alters (or at least separate states) by age four months. He "remembers" his own beginning at age three months or rather can now put it into words -- very unemotional words, considering the trauma.

Knowing what happened that young would seem impossible if I didn't have actual memories and flashbacks that seem to confirm what he's said. From EMDR in therapy, visual memories of the look and layout of the home I lived in before age two are coming back that are consistent with mind images I've had since I started doing memory work in my early twenties.

My mind and body felt that the abuse then was life-threatening, so holding on to that knowledge in some way that could enable the body to survive seems evolutionarily likely. In any case, I do believe it's at least roughly accurate. The core is a baby.

It started when I was an infant, by my mother, suffocation, then she did cpr before dad got home, she said I was "blue" and surprised it worked. My two youngest parts call themselves 6 & 9. She preferred drownings really though. Father preferred raw violence and SA.

i cant seem to get away. i moved across the country to get away from her to realize i spend everyday with her. worst feeling in the world.

((Hugs if wanted))
I can relate. I have parent introjects too.
The stuff they do and say inside literally disgusts me, and turns my stomach. I still shudder from when they took over or came forward and tried to enforce their role. I understand they helped serve a purpose when I was around my foo, but still, ugh. Just so sorry you have them too.

I've heard of parental introjects referred to as "splinters" of the mind. I wish you the best in removing your "splinter."