Pathways to Healing
Note: I was honored to be asked to preach and give four lectures at Bay View Michigan Association, a Chautauqua community, from July 24th through the 28th, 2022. The sermon title is “Remembering the Tough Stuff” and the lectures are entitled: Dissociative What?, Pathways to Recovery, Is Forgiveness the Goal?, and Let It End Here (prevention). I will post one of these offerings each month from August through December. Today’s post is the second lecture delivered on July 26, 2022. Special thanks to Dissociative Writers Arwyn Child and Roger who gave permission for me to use their writing. ~ Lyn
I’d like to begin with a very short passage from 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 where the apostle Paul explains how God worked through a thorn in his flesh.
Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’
Art Credit: Shelley Krammer
The first time I heard this scripture spoken aloud, I was in a Quaker meeting house. The parent of a child I taught stood and spoke to the meaning of this passage for her. It was before I was divorced, before I had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, even before I knew if I believed in God. Instead, it was right smack dab in the middle of my chaos, confusion, craziness, and decompensation.
My ears perked up. Power made perfect in weakness? What could that mean? I felt so weak physically, emotionally, and spiritually that I often wondered if could manage another day. But this scripture held an intriguing possibility.
That the God-I-didn’t-believe-in had the power to work through my weakness to bring me to some sort of wholeness.
That grace – and I had no idea what the word grace meant – was an attribute of God.
That God – if there was such a thing – would be sufficient.
That when I felt weak, perhaps I was really getting in touch with my strength. If the qualifications for this job included weakness, then I was at the head of the line.
Beginning a healing journey is like walking through the wilderness. If you’ve struggled with a chronic or acute physical affliction, or a mental or emotional challenge, then you know what I mean. You begin that walk with no idea where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, or even if you’re going to get there. People told me it was an act of courage to check myself into the hospital and pursue therapeutic treatment, but for me it was an act of survival.
If I was going to live, I would need to uncover what needed uncovering and learn the tools to navigate uncharted territory. I would have to embrace my weakness and trust that grace was in the universe somewhere. I would have to commit to take that first step into the darkness and feel my way along the path, one painful revelation at a time.
The state of mind common to people with DID is so well described by this poem written by Arwyn Child, one of our dissociative writers.
The longing to change –
The tearing apart fear of changes.
The longing to be free –
The unsafe fear of being free.
The longing for touch –
The freezing fear of touch.
The longing to trust –
The heart pounding fear of trusting.
The exquisite longing for intimacy –
The desperate fear of intimacy.
The longing to cry –
The fear that if crying begins it will never stop.
Where does one begin – if beginning is even possible?
Faith
Let me begin by stating clearly and unequivocally that people with DID or other dissociative disorders can and do recover from the debilitating effects of chronic childhood abuse. They can and do live productive and fulfilling lives. I am a living example. For me, faith was the lynch pin that helped me survive the pain, fear, shame, and despair I experienced along the way.
That’s not true for everyone; in fact, tragically, some children have been abused by the church or by people who speak, falsely, in the name of God. When they become adults, it’s important to respect their history, to refrain from pushing our beliefs on them, and to trust that God will find another way to heal them, in the manner that works best for them. In a sense, that’s what God did with me. It began with prayer.
Here is a brief passage from my memoir, Crazy, p. 95-96:
In the earliest days of my decompensation before my acknowledgment of faith, I found myself praying in spite of myself: God, give me strength and wisdom. God, give me strength and wisdom. I had no idea my prayers would be answered; I simply prayed the same prayer over and over again because the very act of praying kept me alive. After about a year, I realized I was getting stronger and smarter. Truly, I thought, the God-that-didn’t-exist was answering my prayers.
Slowly and gradually, through the cracks in this clay pot, through the raw terrain of my body, and the chaotic confusion in my mind, I began to experience God. While teaching and leading the Quaker school, I bathed in the quiet of silent worship. While collapsing catatonically at home, I let the Divine Presence hold me. While navigating the world, I sought relationships with people who embodied a goodness I could only attribute to God.
God’s presence enveloped me, but I still couldn’t “believe” in God. It wasn’t until a few years later, just before I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital, that the walls of unbelief built by my father broke down. Some people might call it a conversion experience, but it felt to me as if I received the faith I always had but couldn’t access.
Was it a coincidence that soon after my “come to Jesus” moment, a new friend wisely ushered me toward treatment? Was it a coincidence that I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital a year after my embrace of faith? I don’t think so. Instead, the God-I-now-believed-in was leading me toward the people, places, and decisions that would ultimately heal me, many years later, after a whole lot of inner work.
Let me share a little bit about what that inner work looked like. How are people like me – on the brink of suicide, battered by unreality, uncertain of who we are, tormented by internal voices, terrified of other people – made whole?
Magic Bullets
To begin with, I’m sorry to say that there is no magic bullet to treat dissociative identity disorder, no medication to take, no switch to flip to make it all go away. God did not miraculously cure me of my craziness. Some folks try to will away their insiders, even exorcise them, but alters aren’t demons to deliver, and they aren’t the external voices you find in schizophrenia. They are parts of us, and even when they seem socially unacceptable (and they do sometimes), it’s because they think they are protecting us. When we were infants and children, they saved our lives. Trying to dull their presence by taking medication is not helpful, although some people do take meds, appropriately, for secondary issues like depression or anxiety. The only way to heal childhood trauma of this extent is to enter into it over a very long period of time, to descend deep into our psyches, and to allow the stories to be told, most often with the guidance of a therapist who acts as a midwife and knows the terrain because they’ve been there before. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Diagnosis
I believe an accurate diagnosis is critical in treating dissociative disorders. Most people are in the treatment system for seven to ten years before receiving a dissociative diagnosis that will lead to effective treatment. There are several reasons for this.
First, there’s still some skepticism about the diagnosis in spite of decades of peer-reviewed research.
Second, those of us with DID don’t make it easy for professionals to diagnose us. DID is called the “hidden disorder” because the whole purpose of the coping strategy is to hide the abuse from the world and from the person who owns it.
Remember, the child needs to believe life is safe so he or she can trust the very people who abuse them. So, we often don’t know we were abused, we often don’t know we are in parts, and we often have no idea what having parts means, until deep into our recovery work. Even then, we often don’t believe ourselves, so why should a medical professional believe us?
For ten years, I had seen two different therapists – unsuccessfully – to help me get my life back on track. It wasn’t until a year after my hospitalization that a psychiatrist affiliated with the hospital formally diagnosed me with multiple personality disorder, later renamed dissociative identity disorder. I had been working with Sonia – my third therapist – for about nine months and we had had numerous sightings of my multiple selves.
Although the in-depth diagnostic evaluation frightened me, it also relieved me. It made sense. It didn’t cure me, for sure – I had only just begun – but now I had something to hang my hat on. I wasn’t crazy. There was a reason why I was acting and feeling the way I was.
Three Stages of Therapy
Therapists attuned to DID say there are three stages a client must go through to heal from chronic early childhood abuse. Safety, stabilization, and symptom reduction is the first stage. After a decade of disorienting and debilitating decompensation, my hospitalization marked the beginning of this stage for me.
The second stage is remembering and mourning which, for me, meant another decade plunge into my psyche, meeting my parts, hearing their stories, managing triggers, and addressing trust and relationship issues. My faith sustained me during these twenty difficult years.
The third stage of therapy is reconnection and integration where we remake ourselves, and the lives we live, on the foundation we’ve been building during the second stage of work. This final stage is when I left Sonia and the in-depth therapy we were doing together, I resigned from my position as a school principal, and I went to seminary where God shaped me into the person I was meant to be. It was a scary time to take this leap, but I knew I had to break the cord and embrace my life, the good with the bad, the easy with the hard, the clarity with the confusion.
All in all, this encompassed about 40 years of my life: 10 years of decompensation, 10 years of deep work that required me to remember what I would have preferred to keep hidden, and 20 years of integration and reconstruction where you see me standing before you now.
These stages aren’t always linear and there’s a lot of overlap. For instance, we may have to re-stabilize ourselves after a new stress in our current life when we thought we had already done that. We may meet new insiders with new stories to tell after we thought we were integrated and whole. We loop through these stages, always moving forward and, by the grace of God, always healing. Prayer, once again, was a lifeline that enabled me to survive while unearthing the unsurvivable.
Here's another passage from my memoir, Crazy, about prayer. p.95-96:
When I was in the psychiatric hospital, I learned the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. This prayer has been the bedrock for people with addictions for decades. I took that prayer and changed it to suit my needs: God grant me the courage, strength and wisdom to know myself and do your will. I needed courage to face the unfaceable, strength to keep going every day, and wisdom to uncover the complicated machinations of my mind. I needed to discover who I was, both angel and demon, and everything in between. God grant me the courage, strength and wisdom to know myself and do your will.
Alters & Memory Work
Early one morning after I was discharged from the hospital, I had a twilight dream that woke me with a jolt. A voice said to me, “You have a twin sister, but she is me, and they gave her away, and her name is Rosie.” This cryptic message made no sense – I didn’t know anyone named Rosie, I didn’t have a twin sister, and my parents certainly didn’t give anyone away, at least not in the literal sense.
It turned out that Rosie was a two- or three-year-old child who is the center of my system. Our alters, altogether, are called a system, and my system was named “Ring Around the Rosie,” a take-off from the children’s game of the same name.
Rosie was able to trust my abuser over and over again because she gave the abuse she experienced to another alter named Nanny, whose role was to take care of her and to carry the extreme and unremitting pain.
Mike rumbled into the therapy room full of anger and righteous injustice while his twin sister, Sylvia, carried my sexuality that had been hidden for decades. Together, they were teenagers with big teenage emotions revolving around anger and sexuality.
Paula and Laura managed my teaching in the classroom with Paula being the finely tuned professional and Laura the one who loved children. In fact, Laura is the one who raised my children until she perceived danger in our family and disappeared, leaving me high and dry without parenting skills.
These are just a few of the 20 or so alters I met, each with a specific purpose or skill set in my life. Rosie, Nanny, Mike, Sylvia, Paul, Laura, and more.
Whenever a new part of me would introduce themselves to Sonia, even if they were angry and loaded for bear, Sonia would always greet them saying, “Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here. You’re safe now. I hope you come back again.” A large part of therapy includes working with our insiders and fostering communication between them. Sometimes they arrive knowing each other, and sometimes they haven’t a clue. As they begin to build relationships and collaborate instead of working at cross purposes, they share their stories.
A goal in therapy is for everyone in the system to share the same history and we can only do that by knowing what happened to our different parts. So we give them a voice which begins to lower our amnesic walls. Eventually, we all know everything so we can function as a whole unit rather than as individual parts. Memory work and becoming friends with our insiders go hand-in-hand.
Attachment, Trust, & Relationship Issues
If you can imagine a small child trying to maneuver between loving an adult and experiencing frequent, soul-killing abuse from that very same adult, you will understand why people with dissociative disorders have attachment, trust, and relationship issues. Before therapy, we often choose unhealthy friends and unavailable partners, and we are incapable of authentic, intimate relationships. It’s not surprising, then, that addressing these issues is critical to becoming the whole, happy, and functioning human beings God intends for us.
For me, six years of weekly group therapy was the unexpected impetus for healing those wounds. Now, I rarely feel vulnerable around other people and can navigate many different kinds of personalities. That wasn’t always the case. I’ll talk about that a little more tomorrow when we discuss forgiveness. Once again, out of our weakness comes the strength – the power of God – that makes us whole.
Auxiliary Therapies: Bodywork, Writing, EMDR, & Internal Family Systems
Every aspect of treatment I’ve referred to up until now has been embedded in compassionate, trauma-informed talk therapy. Now, I would like to mention two other treatment modalities and some auxiliary work that supports healing. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and Internal Family Systems are two approaches to trauma healing that I’ve never experienced so can’t give a first-person account. However, I’ve heard that both modalities can be very helpful to people with DID and certainly for people with trauma histories who don’t have DID. I’ve also been told that some folks with DID react adversely to both modalities. Perhaps the therapist didn’t consider the implications of DID systems and the unique ways in which they work when implementing therapy. In general, I believe these are strong approaches to addressing trauma in many people, but I also think folks with DID need to approach them with care.
Two other auxiliary approaches to healing, in addition to the trauma work I’ve already discussed, are body work and writing. Bessel Van der Kolk, chief researcher at the Harvard University Trauma Center and the author of The Body Keeps the Score, places great emphasis on using yoga to help trauma survivors reclaim their bodies after lifetimes of dissociation. Indeed, dissociation is the very act of separating mind from body, so yoga holds great potential to help survivors ground themselves when triggered and reintegrate their bodies and minds into a whole. Although I didn’t use that modality, I highly recommend it based on all I’ve heard.
Writing
On the other hand, writing is something I did use, profoundly and profusely. I first began journaling about 40 years ago when I was decompensating and writing lists to get my life back on track. Five things to accomplish this weekend. Ten goals for the New Year. Three issues to discuss with my son’s teacher. You know the drill. Gradually, those pages morphed into a place where cryptic messages would appear out of nowhere.
Earlier, I spoke of Rosie’s introduction in a twilight dream, which I immediately recorded in my journal so I wouldn’t forget it. Yesterday, I read an excerpt from my journal that began, “Pretend I never existed. I never existed.”
At home, I have a plastic container with dozens of journals with thousands of words scratched out over the years. It took time to realize that these messages were cries for help from parts of me who were hidden, hurting, and in pain. Their messages disturbed me, and, in the moment, I didn’t know what to do with them, but over time my journal became a safe space for alters to express themselves.
Some people with DID have a special journal for each alter, or a journal specifically designed for alters to talk to each other. Often therapists, including my own, invite us to leave last week’s journal pages at each session so they can communicate with alters through the written word. Writing is a channel into our psyches that connects the past with the present and brings the parts of our minds that have split off back into the fold of everyday experience.
In the past year and a half, I’ve learned another powerful way to use writing to heal. In an effort to create a platform before my memoir was published, I began to hold virtual writers workshops for people with dissociative disorders.
Wow. I had no clue that I was opening a dam and releasing a flood of writing from people who have held it in for decades. They’re everyday folks just like you and me, some who are on public assistance, some who are artists, some who are musicians, some who are college professors, some who are therapists themselves, but all with dissociative disorders, all gathering together every week online to share their stories. Dissociative writers workshop is the place where we can release our pain and find bonding where once there was fear. In many ways, my memoir and our Dissociative Writers workshops, are the culmination of my healing.
Wrap-Up
In the end, we heal our trauma by excavating our memories – both bodily, traumatic memories and actual narrative memories. We get to know our alters who hold those memories by giving them a voice. We manage our triggers in the same way, using body work and grounding techniques to calm our insiders. We work on relationships so we can take our place in the world as loving individuals who know how to set boundaries.
In the end, some of us, like me, integrate those memories so we function as one individual. Other people integrate those memories but choose to remain in parts, which we call functional multiplicity. I will not address that option further as it’s not one that I chose. However, these are both valid choices made by survivors who are becoming thrivers.
Remember, you will probably never know the one, two, or three people in your life who have DID because most of us don’t tell. Sharing with you now through my memoir and these talks is one way I can help to break through the walls of stigma so others with DID will begin to share their voices. Praise God who takes lemons and turns them into lemonade through power made perfect in weakness.
Thank you for your attention today. Join me tomorrow when we’ll look at forgiveness, its power and its limitations. Let me close with an untitled piece of writing by a dissociative writer named Roger.
So here we live feeling broken and shattered. How does one break free from the darkness, the fear, the humiliation? By facing it dead on. Shed light on the memories and allow the parts to tell their stories. The memories lose power when light is shed upon them. Like evil beings, they flee the light; they shrivel and shrink in size.
The memories will never go away, but we don't need to be controlled by them. We can overcome their influence on us. It is a daily struggle but one that must be fought. For the alternative is to live a life defeated. I will not, can not allow that to happen to me. I will rise above the darkness and live in the light of God's protection.
DW Meeting October 10
DW meets once a month to set direction and policy. Some of the initiatives DW has guided in the past have been speaking at conferences, producing an anthology, sustaining DW longterm through a subscription basis, and moving to the Groupeasy platform. All subscribers are invited to attend. Our core team is Sharon (admin), Gabby (scribe), and Debby (treasurer). Your voice is important too; we want to hear your thoughts and ideas. When you attend regularly, you may become a core team member too!
Our next meeting is Monday, October 10, at 6:30 pm Eastern (5:30 Central, 4:30 Mountain, 3:30 Pacific). You can find the link on the calendar when you click on DW Meeting, or use the link you have been using all along for workshops.
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Don’t lose hope, nor be sad.
Quran 3: 139