FALLING THROUGH FEAR

TRIGGER WARNING:

Some of the information in this document may be upsetting, especially if the reader has suffered child abuse. Only read if you feel safe. Thank you Emily C. Summers

Diagnostic Criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder: DSMIV:

a) The presence of two or more distinct identities or personalities (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self.)

b) At least two of these identities or personality states recurrently take control of the persons behaviour.

c) Inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.

d) The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g. Blackouts or chaotic behaviour during intoxication) or a general medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures).

My story is a narrative about innocence lost, trust negated and betrayal all that I knew. How is it possible for me to write this story, the secrets of my life on this perfectly white blank page, when what is within my mind, my memories escape me so vividly? I know that my memories are hidden within these pages, like when I was a child and used a magic pen. The story is here, all I need to do is my rub against the page, against my mind to find the memories, and the words will magically appear in black ink.

Do I even want to do this? Is it at all possible to become a beautiful butterfly if I keep struggling against the confines of this cocoon? Do I even dare? The white page encompasses the serenity of my mind, of memories forgotten or deliberately blocked. Black ink is the pain of the memories pushing to the front of my mind.

I'm not sure that I want to destroy the sanctity of this perfect white page! However, I know I must, so that I can be set free. Sometimes I feel like I'm sinking into the eternal and inescapable quagmire of blackness. My older sister says to me 'get over yourself, it's not always about you, you are such a drama queen.

These statements go around and around in my mind. I question myself as to whether I am a selfish person to take this time to focus on myself or I am merely rehashing old news? Is it possible for me to come out at the end as a sane, intact human being?

The trauma I endured as a young child has affected my physiological, psychological and interpersonal experiences throughout my life. Because the trauma started so early and the perpetrator was my own father, the effects were greater.

Trauma is more emotion than the mind can handle and Dissociative Identity Disorder is a survival mechanism, which manifests from unresolved and unintegrated trauma that is severe, occurs early in life and is prolonged. My body could not escape from the pain of life so my mind took the original birth child (Joyce) to a safe place, far within myself.

Other personality states were created by my incredibly adaptable brain to live through life, and walk through pain. Emily is the alter most often presenting to the outside world, whilst the others orchestrate living from inside my mind. Can I perhaps reconstruct my life to believe that I was loved, nurtured and happy? Yes, that I could do. but it won't be the truth. Magical thinking is the place where dreams become possible and imagination makes things real.

How can I retrieve wonderful childhood memories when I never got to be a child?

I never had a childhood!

I was dragged into this world already one thousand years old, straight from cradle to adult lifestyle, adult responsibilities. I understood way too much for a little girl. I had to it was a very dangerous world.

Perhaps out there was safe, but the universe within my world could eat me up and spit me out in the space of an exhaled breath. I lived my life through inhaled breath, waiting, sometimes hoping and praying for the pleasant escape that death could bring.

My mother drank heavily whilst pregnant with me. I am reminded still of this fact because of the line of empty beer bottles she planted along the back of our Housing Commission House. Stamped on the side of each and every bottle is the year 1964, the year of my birth. They represent the deeply buried lies. The empty amber colours disclose insidiously what lies behind truth.

I was the third child born of a marriage steeped in the deep seated rage of an alcoholic blind man, and a terrified, beaten, manic-depressive alcoholic mother.

My father had been physically beating and emotionally abusing my mother regularly by the time I was born. Perhaps she felt so trapped, and in so much pain that she had given in to the acrid stench of resignation. My parents never kept me safe nor nurtured me, as they should. It's a primal thing, this drive for humans to survive against all odds. And the resilience of a small child still amazes me.

I was six months old when our family doctor diagnosed me as a "failure to thrive" baby. I was severely underweight since I will not eat, and was unresponsive and sickly. I wanted to die. The doctor told my parents that if I am to survive they must give me to someone who will look after me.

They sent me to my Great Aunty Florrie's and Great uncle Len's farm to be looked after until I was eighteen months old. It was the first and last time in my childhood that I felt safe, nurtured and loved. I am certain that the respite they give me from the extreme abuse restored in me the will to survive. I remember riding on the tractor with my Great Uncle Len where I felt happy, safe and free. Aunty Florrie let me gather eggs from the chickens and also milk the cows. It was a tremendously fun time, and I began to thrive.

When I was eighteen months old, after a year of love and safety, the time came when my parents arrived to take me "home" to that unsafe and destructive place where I again want to die.

I am sitting at the edge of my computer chair, staring out the window trying to drown out the constant noise emanating from within my head. I hear the sounds of sobs, angry voices, crying babies, voices full of hatred all crying out in voices that only I can hear.

Inside my mind, technicolour confetti flicks behind my eyes. The tiny fragments of memory are elusive. Though I try to reach out with my mind's eye, I cannot touch them, nor gather them with my hands. I cannot make my mind stop these shards of memory at will.

The early life was the craziest. I still hold fragments of memories of myself standing at the door of the hallway leading from the bedrooms into the lounge room. I heard my mother screaming and saw the blood spurt from her nose as my father's fists smashed repeatedly into her face and body. The blood seeped from my mother into the green threadbare carpet. My father was sitting astride her and trying to strangle her. I jumped on him to try to pull him off, but he threw me off him with a flick of his arm.

I always took the shame for my mother and felt responsible for her. I tried to protect her from my father's ragesover and over again. But I was such a very little girl. I still feel guilt and shame because I couldnt make him stop!

My mother made up a makeshift bed with threadbare blankets that she placed on the dirt ground under the house to keep us warm and dry on

those cold, windy, rainy nights. I snuck out of the house and slept in that dark place with her. We snuggled togetheralone, trapped and terrified. We held each other to try to give comfort to our deadened and abandoned souls.

My father's specialty was playing mind games with me. He loved this strategybecause he could change the rules at will. My father had to win. I could never guess what it was he wanted me to doto say. It did not matter since I always got it wrong no matter how hard I tried.

He punished me....alwaysnearly every-day. Nothing was ever predictable about my father, except for the beatings. I could always rely on such thing. Beatings were a given in this life I was born into. A natural part of my pathetic existence. Fear ruled my life.

My father had a ritual he always followed every time my punishment was due. He would take his belt, or the jug cord, in his hands and snap it open and shutopen and shutlike the sound of two hands clapping. He walked towards me with slow menace and evil grin. He ordered me to take my underpants off and lay across the kitchen chair or over his legs.

I sometimes would feel the warmth of the yellow urine running down my small, bare legs, as if all the fear I was feeling was flowing out from my tiny body with the rancid liquid. I felt as if I was a million fractured pieces of glass, broken and scattered, naked on the floor.

I loved having my nightly bath. I would step into the warm bath water. I would close my eyes and let my body sink beneath the water my ears just below the water level in peaceful serenity. I would imagine I was a fairy flitting in the most beautiful garden full of pinks and purples.free and safe where No-one could hurt me.

A hand on my stomach awakened me from my dreaming. My father would stroke his hand down my stomach and over my private parts. This was the only nice caress I ever got.

In my bed at night I was alone at last. That's how I liked it. Alone was safer than anything else. Sometimes, late at night my father would visit my sister in her bed, next to mine.

I was often awakened by muffled noises. I would look over to my sister's bed, if I dared. A small shard of light emanated from the moon's glow that filtered through the rips in my thread-bare blue curtains. I would repeatedly bear witness to the things my father did. He would be lying on top of my sister, rubbing his body against hers. As the years went by I learnt to sleep tucked under the thread bare blankets, wrapped up in my own pretend womb.

In 1972 my father joined Parents without Partners. This was a year after he had Mum committed to Morisset Mental Hospital. He began to make lots of new friends who believed him to be a wonderful man, provider and father. This belief was exacerbated because my father was also in the Australian Blind Cricket Team.

In 1974 he was nominated by Parents Without Partners for N.S.W. Father of the Year. My father won the award and all of us children were excited, not only to be on the cover of the Newcastle Herald but since we went on the popular Stuart Wagstaff Show. However, to me and my siblings he was a 'street angel and house devil'.

When I was fifteen my father broke my tailbone.

The incident happened around dinnertime. My father felt his way with his hands along the cigarette stained kitchen wall, until he located the

fridge. He was deciding what I was to cook for dinner. He can't tell by the feel of the vegetables what they are, which is frustrating him. He called me in from the lounge room where I was watching 'Happy Days'. 'Joyce, come here and show me which is the cabbage and which is the cauliflower!

Because I was accustomed to 'freezing' when I was anywhere near the vicinity of my father I could not find my voice. My father says 'are you a fuckwit or what?' upstairs for thinking, downstairs for dancing'. However, the only sounds I coul muster were. 'Idddd...don't... know'. My father became incensed. He grabbed me by both shoulders, turned me around, and kicked me hard, in the tailbone. Then he walked away.

My legs buckled from underneath me. I fell. I hit the hard linoleum tiles.

I was all alone. No one came to help me. I layed there for the longest time, unable to move and too scared to call out for help. I was afraid because I was unable to move. I felt like throwing up. I was in agony. I lay there for possibly twenty minutes, though it could have been an hour. I lost all sense of time.

I was making pictures in my mind from the patterns in the tiles. I could create faces, shapes of horses, boats sailing away imagining I was anywhere but here.

I lost myself and melted into the linoleum tiles until I disappeared.

In my present life, when I go through a traumatic experience, or am triggered into a memory of the past, the memory of the trauma is dissociated from my normal memory. This enables me to mentally escape from the fear of the original trauma. Because of my ability to 'go away', my memories are altered and sense of personal history and identity is affected. When one of my parts attempts suicide, I have few, if any conscious memories of what has transposed.

Ebony, a very angry alter, decided that the only way to let some of the anguish inside of her out was to cut my body thirty times, on the left thigh with a razor blade. The whole experience was surreal. I felt as though I was standing behind myself, looking on at what Ebony was doing, but I had no ability to stop, nor influence what was happening.

I felt nothing as the razor sliced through my delicate skin. No painno anguish just a sweet sense of expulsion of hurt and pain, shame and guilt. I remember snippets of what has happenned at these times because some of my parts are co-conscious. When a multiple is co-conscious it is like riding in the back seat of a car. I can see and hear what is happening but have no control over what the driver is doing.

This is what happens to me a lot of the time. Though in times of extreme distress I go away to a safe place in my mind, leaving whoever is out front to do what they need to do. There are times when every day becomes a life and death struggle and suicide becomes an escape option.

Rage is an extremely angry child who holds most of the worst abuse memories. His task is to protect the system from any perceived harm from other people. Unfortunately, this may mean that he feels so unsafe anywhere that he will try to kill the body.

It was 2007. Night had fallen. My head was exploding with a cacophony of noise and pain. Rage went out into the car, reversed it carefully out of the driveway and manoeuvred it into the tiny space in the garage. After pressing the remote control to close the automatic door he fed the garden hose into the exhaust pipe. Since there is no gaffer tape on hand he used old pieces of rag around the hose to keep it in place.

Once the hose was fastened to the exhaust pipe, he then fed the other end of the hose through the small opening in the front passenger side window. The gap was then filled with more rags so that the exquisite pain releasing gas could flow readily within the confines of the car.

Rage then got into the driver's seat and turned on the engine. With some music playing in the background he made himself comfortable by putting the car seat back, and with a blanket around him, and phone in hand, he went to sleep.

The next time that I am aware of, I was talking to an emergency worker who was attempting to get me to tell him my street address and to turn off the engine. I did not remember any specific details, just snippets, but I turn the engine key off eventually.

The next aware moment, I found myself sitting on my sofa talking calmly to the person on the other end of the line. To me, Emily, this behaviour is pathetic and I hate that this is done to my body. But mostly I feel for the people I have dragged into my mess.

There is beauty in dissociation. It allows me to readily disconnect from feeling and being so that I am able to move forward after doing such things. There is always guilt and shame attached, which is something I'm working through.

When I cry, it is someone else's tears. I do not feel anything except taste the strangeness of a salty wetness on my lips. Sometimes I can feel a deep sadness inside of me, not true pain, just the knowledge of it. I know it's not my pain, it is far within me. I am aware that the sense of it is there, though I cannot touch it.

Memories are a sense of self that sometimes float like autumn leaves, falling from a tree into memory.

I cannot sleep. It is five o'clock in the early morning. It is gloomy outside the window. The gloom reflects the way I feel inside. I get up out of bed after tossing and turning for the longest time. I take a sleeping tablet, and yet I cannot fathom sleep. My girlfriend slumbers peaceably. The cats can sleep. My mind cannot rest.

Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder is fraught at times with disorganization and inconsistency. That's me to a tee, trying to be organized with lists and diaries my family convinced that I reside at the bottom of the garden, dancing and singing and playing with the other little faeries. With the life I have lead, sometimes I think that it is where I would rather stay in any case. The things that I bore witness to would affect the strongest of children for the rest of their lives. The impact on me, as a developing child experiencing trauma on a daily basis, has been one of life long confusion and pain.

I believe that it was the gift of Dissociation, fracturing into many personalities, which has made it possible for me to survive at all. I finally understand the difference between insisting on meaning and the reconstruction of it. The difference being that I would always try to substitute with a lie. Now I try to get through the pain of the truth, to the others side.

I believe that child abuse changes who we inherently are. I also passionately believe that healing can occur. But to do this, survivors need to have the courage to break the silence and tell their story their truth. I believe that if we live our lives negating the truth, we are living a life devoid of exuberancewhich is like living a slow death.

And so here we are, all thirty of us in this body we call home. And maybe someday when we are all finished crying, we'll learn to love again. Learning to love, learning to live, is the only way we can get through, broken but still beautiful. What has come from the darkness of one child's experience is slowly transcending into hope, support, friendship and love.