Garbage Feelings

I think that everyone who has ever been abused has experienced "garbage feelings," even if they haven't called them by that name. But for me, I felt like I was garbage. I felt that I was so low beneath human beings that I didn't have the right to breathe, let alone live. I believed that garbage was better than me.

Those feelings were supported by a myriad of things. Like the offenders who had manilpulated the truth to justify their behavior, I continued to manipulate the world around me to see myself according to the feelings associated with abuse and the view the offenders had of me. I lived in a world warped by the realities of child abuse.

Each victim perceives their abuse differently and so interprets their reasons for being unlovable, stupid, insignificant, trapped, valueless, ugly, fat, bad, powerless, unworthy, evil, unhuman, untrustworthy, hopeless, crazy, a failure, out of control. The list goes on and on but put them all together and for me, these were garbage feelings. I lived under their constant domination.

It was really hard getting out from underneath the control of these feelings. It took a lot of awful memories resurfacing to even begin to understand that those feelings were a direct result of the abuse that I endured. I was convinced that I deserved to feel this way and I was reluctant to give up that view.

While any and all victims of abuse, battering, rape etc experience these kinds of feelings, for the person with multiple personality disorder things get more complicated. Because the psyche is fragmented off into compartments, each compartment can have its own set of garbage feelings.

Trying to silence the inner voices from those compartments and teach them that "garbage feelings" really belong to the abusers and NOT the victim can be a huge task. This issue takes lots and lots of external re-enforcement to resolve even for a singleton but for the multiple the complexity is intensified by how many alters or personalities that might be present within the system. It is also affected by how closed off the compartments are from each other.

The very complexity of the muliple system, makes most multiples quite needy. Each part of them requires the same positive reenforcement that probably one "singleton" type person would need to heal. With some systems having many, many parts, resolving these issues can be as complicated as the systems themselves.

The odds of a person with MPD or DID working through these issues without a therapist are probably astonomical to say the least. Yet many multiples have been abused by a therapist or the treatment community itself, making it nearly impossible for that individual to trust a therapist or the therapy process.

It is a catch 22 for the multiple who is struggling with garbage feelings. Do they take a chance on another therapist and maybe another until they find one helpful to them? Or do they forget about therapy and hope they can manage this difficult journey on their own? The problem really lies in the roadmap.

Therapy is really learning to change our perceptions of the world. It is practically impossible to learn to view life and ourselves without the chains of garbage feelings when we have no experiece with a world without them. A good therapist supplies that new view to challenge old beliefs.

I think to accomplish the task of working through garbage feelings takes a very strong support system even with a therapist. I would hope that any multiple who had been damaged by a therapist or the therapuetic community would try to locate a suitable therapist by reaching out to other survivors and seeking out lots and lots of references.

But I also believe firmly, that we can do whatever we set our minds to. If a multiple is determined, has good resources and can build a great support system, healing is possible.

To be continued............

multiple personality disorder MPD dissociative Identity disorder did