Maybe
it starts with ….
Some kind of a crisis and the person starts to
unravel and fall apart. That’s what happened to me back in 1990. I was doing
fine, then had my first panic attack because I had been triggered by a teacher
at college who reminded me of an abuser, even though I didn’t realize that’s
what had happened. Within a couple of months I completely fell apart but didn’t
know why. So I went to therapy.
The crisis might be in the form of some kind of
stressor that the person is unable to cope with. For me it was the sudden death
of 4 different people I had known the previous year and the stress of school
work and raising my son on my own.
As the crisis continues the person may begin to
dissociate more (and more personalities try to come out in order to cope) as
well as start to have symptoms of other illnesses – depression, anxiety,
substance abuse, self-harm, etc.
It’s also possible that one or more of the
personalities want to begin coming out more in the person’s life and thus, cause
an internal crisis to take place.
It’s also possible that one personality gets tired
of all the pain in their life, tired of headaches, nightmares, losing time,
depression, anxiety, forgetting things, flashbacks and other symptoms.
It’s also possible that one or more personalities
might decide that it’s time to heal. After those deaths in my life some of my personalities
created a new personality because they had a sense that it was time to confront
the past. The new personality was to help us function as normally as possible
when we started therapy and confronted the abuse. They knew that we would fall
apart and would need to find good ways of coping.
Also I, as one personality who was out a lot of the
time, was feeling very troubled and very empty in my life. I knew I was missing
something but I didn’t know it was the rest of myself that I was missing.
Sometimes the person might go to therapy because
they are lonely for themselves. They can feel something is missing in their
life. They may often feel hollow and empty. Once the healing process begins and
they start to discover the personalities within they feel more real, more
whole, and more complete. They feel they are no longer lying to themselves
about who they are in the world. The person feels she has found her true self.
