Articles and Blogs

After trauma our brains are sensitised to threat and our amygdala – our brain’s ‘smoke alarm’ – tends to react to burnt toast as if the house is on fire. In this article I show how to turn down the sensitivity of our smoke alarm – and overcome the impacts of trauma.

Denial and dissociation are two sides of the same coin. In employing dissociation, we are employing denial: “This isn’t happening” or “This isn’t happening to me.” We create alter personalities to whom it happened, so that it didn’t happen to me.

Sexual abuse is still a taboo subject. It is generally thought that between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4 girls experience sexual abuse before the age of consent. But despite this, we rarely read about the impact that might have on women experiencing pregnancy, birth and then parenthood. And it can have a huge effect on any or all of those aspects of life.

Men with dissociative identity disorder are in the minority, at least in terms of being diagnosed. This series of interviews explores the experience of dissociation and recovery from child sexual abuse from a male perspective, with stark honesty and vulnerability.

I have dissociative identity disorder. I have many separate, distinct and unique ‘parts’ of my personality. My ‘parts’ or ‘alters’ collectively add up to the total person that is me. I am the sum of all my parts. They are each a letter, and I am a sentence.

Physical symptoms are a big part of life for me with DID. Yes, I have ‘multiple personalities’, but I would say that physical symptoms such as chronic, unexplained pain, headaches and nausea have been and still remain far more distressing and life-impacting for me than the presence of parts.

Crisis makes sense. The adrenaline of it can become addictive, or be all we’ve known. Life doesn’t feel right if things aren’t frantic, if relationships aren’t disastrous. Crisis can be an attachment cry. Crisis is the language of emotions that we don’t know how to regulate.

For a long time, therapy sessions would end with a fairly typical exchange. I would express frustration at myself for not doing enough, and gently but firmly the response from my therapist would go, ‘Be kind to yourself.’

Powerlessness is such a core experience for victims of abuse that often we don’t even notice that it’s there. It is played out in the way that we interact with people and the world – it’s the shadow cast by the sun, rather than the sunlight itself.

I look up and I am in my therapist’s room. I look up and I am in the cafe area of the shopping mall. I look up and I am in bed in the dark. I look up and I don’t know if I am I. There is no thread of continuity between these places, these experiences. Who am I now, writing this, re-reading this, re-writing this?

In this article, I describe the process of designing 'a life worth living' as part of the process of recovery from trauma.

What is it like to be me? What is it like to be the me that is me-not-you, different, alone, DID? You – in my minds you are you-not-us, but who am I to you? Can you know me?

I hate my body. It was there, always there, during the abuse. My mind went away but my body could not. My mind could forget.