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With the anticipation, similar to days before birth of a first child, another form of publication will soon be released. From our smaller presence in earlier days of the 5 yr Child Abuse Royal Commission (CARC), the need to ‘join the dots’ began to call out. Hopefully, with the increased-global visitors of our RCbbc Blog, we’re now able to Share another media: Newsletters! eNews are becoming a greater extension of the 247 work-cycle, allowing wider varieties of audio, visual, text & combinations of media to be exchanged. A business plan is still being developed, yet many feel that these swapping of ideas is helpful.
Psychotherapy, Counselling and Personal Development in Glasgow, Scotland
ABUSE AND EXPLOITATION, DISSOCIATION
Fractured? No, curiously I feel fractured but I see myself in the mirror and I’m whole, standing still like a house. The mirror may be fractured, but my eyes still swivel like windows in this head, guided by a nose that acts as a weather vane. I open and close my mouth like a door and my ears sit like unoiled hinges. But I don’t feel like a house. I feel like a room: a room divided against itself.
If I am whole, how come there are holes in my experience? Not holes; they just feel like holes. They’re no more holes than my forgetting what I had for breakfast last Tuesday is a hole. If I decide, out of my indecision comes a need to follow a trail of breadcrumbs, walking backwards in flip-flop sandals: Shameday, Shatterday, Frightday, Thugsday, Whensday, Chewsday: vegetarian bacon that tasted like cardboard soaked in lapsang souchong.
Broken. Like a wine glass washed in a lapse of concentration, snapped stem in the sink? No, I just feel broken. I’m no more broken than my daydream in the bubbles is a symptom of a broken mind. I just went travelling for a second and broke a glass, not my hip.
No fractures, no holes. Not broken, nor split. I am a house of rooms, not a room divided. The room I’m in is ordered, organised, geometric wallpaper, square like Kant; catalogued like a library run by a nunnery. My lamp has a name and a function. My telephone first rang in ’76. My sofa has a history, and I remember my happiness the day I bought it; how angry I was when I spilled wine on it; how annoyed at the bit of chocolate that fell between the cushions. I feel my weight on it. Feel the cold in my fingers. I am here. It is now. I am here and I am now.
The hall. A place for uninvited guests. I ran down it when I was 5, I’m-alive, scurried into the cupboard and was never seen again. The hall connects me to the rest of the house I have forgotten, but more importantly to the front door, which leads out into the garden; into the world. I never know if it’s locked. Instead of checking, I forget that it’s a hall, save the ticking of an old clock that I forget to hear whilst listening to the fizz of my ginger beer, age 7, pray to heaven. Instead I convince myself that the livingroom I’m in is all there is. Then, by switching off the light and locking the door, forget myself and my convincing. Until I need to pee, or eat. And then I find myself sock-sliding down the hall like a uterine ghost, so focussed on my empty belly or full bladder I forget to remember that I opened the door; forgetting which room I was in, until I am in the other room, floorboards creaking with the slightest shift in weight.
Another room, another name, another door, another age. Age 6, pick up sticks. Other shadow, other feeling. Cooling, cooler, cold and colder. The familiar unfamiliar. No lightbulb in, no switch to fumble for. In this room I forget to remember and remember to forget. Boxes stacked on boxes, dust and cobwebs. I pick a box in disarray and ginger ale my way in beneath the lifting lid. It contains hundreds of fizzing photographs, sepia toned, disorganised, random, full of Leica moments hastily shuffled away, forgetting to remember; each snap the snap of a twig in a dark damp wood; the snap of a little finger; the snap, crackle and pop of a nice crisp morning in December, and then a dread-filled evening; and all with felt feelings, felt, falling. The sea swell of a gut without words; the electric surge of anxious malady rising in my spine. Shapes without outlines. Tone without form. Colour without texture. Chaos without order. Things that happened before I had words to describe them.
I find myself in a drawer inside a mood inside a box inside a room. Another lapse. Like driving from the house to the store and realising I wasn’t conscious of driving at all. At all. At all. New room, new mood, new name, new world. A ball of string, a roll of tape, some false teeth, a paperclip, an old birthday card from a forgotten friend, a rubber band and some tic-tacs. There are reasons I don’t come in here. It’s a mess: deformed, unfinished. I’ve no energy for this: to clean it out, tidy it up, organise it. Too many memories. One day. Some day. Just not now.
Hallway. Like the drive to the store I didn’t notice, or the tree I ignored on the street I’ve walked for a decade and suddenly appears out of nowhere one day, when the light hits its leaves and I awaken to its colours and the breeze, warm like Frankincense whispering through its branches, and my feet in my soft shoes, so soft I forget my feet. I want to say sorry to that tree. Sorry to my feet and to my shoes. Sorry I neglected you. A three hundred year old tree growing through twelve hundred seasons, existing for everyone else but me.
My hallway stays forgotten; conduit to my wholeness; pipeline to the world. Invisible as I close my eyes. It connects my rooms, my fears: it is the forgotten centre of my house: the house I forget to remember to forget. I prefer the known knowing of organised places to the unknown knawing of my silent spaces. Sunlight comes in through the south window, hot coffee in a comforting cup five inches from the table’s edge, precarious, but no spinning head. Here, I know my name, I have words for things and things for words, and syntax and paragraphs. I know my here and now, I know my differentiated place, I know my own familiar face. It is the face of a house of rooms, and rooms of boxes. Some are ordered, stacked and indexed, comprehendible by their stories, hand-written and clear as etched metal. Some are filled with a confusion of shadows, wordlessness, uncertainty, memories, darkness and a child’s trembling. Still the trembling, still the heart.
I am still like a house. But I feel like a room.
Photo credit: wikimedia commons
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Retrieved https://therapyglasgow.com/2019/02/02/dissociative-identity-disorder/?c=166#comment-166
“…He [Christ] spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And He said to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’…So he went and washed, and came back seeing” (John 9: 6-7).
The miracle of the blind man is recorded in the Bible to teach us that infirmity is not necessarily the consequence of sin.
Certainly, as the victims of child abuse, we did not, ourselves, sin. Trauma, however, lefts its mark on us. Among its scars is the tendency we have to seek out and return to dysfunctional relationships.
What Christ’s love does for abuse victims is heal (or reduce) those scars, and cause the scales to fall from our eyes. We can see the world more clearly, undistorted by the lies we were told by predators about the nature of love and our own supposed lack of value.
Christ’ love for victims is tender. “A bruised reed He will not break…” (Isaiah 42: 3). Rather than inflict pain on us, He grieves over the pain we have endured. That tenderness restores our self-worth, eliminating the need we feel to return to toxic relationships, and making us again whole.
FOR MORE OF MY ARTICLES ON POVERTY, POLITICS, AND MATTERS OF CONSCIENCE CHECK OUT MY BLOG A LAWYER’S PRAYERS AT: https://alawyersprayers.com
Retrieved: https://avoicereclaimed.com/2019/03/10/returning-to-toxic-relationships-part-3/
1990s thriller Basic Instinct, Michael Douglas plays a troubled homicide detective who becomes involved with a female serial killer. Despite this woman’s overt sexuality, others can see that she is dangerous. The detective is blind to that. He believes he has found true love and redemption.
What motivates the detective is not, however, love. It is a deep sense of guilt over a shooting incident that occurred while he was high on cocaine. He has, in effect, a death wish.
This is not to say that abuse victims have a death wish, when we return to toxic relationships. Love can though be a minefield for us.
We are all too easily blinded by our childhood experience – experience that was tainted by abuse. We frequently mistake dysfunctional relationships for love, and fail to recognize real love when we actually encounter it.
Having been trained to tolerate abuse, we do not see the danger. We settle for what we had in the past. That feels “right”. That resonates with us, striking a profound chord, so “must” be love. Other relationships pale by comparison.
It does not occur to us we deserve better. Until we come to that realization, toxic relationships will continue to hold power for us.
This series will conclude next week.
FOR MORE OF MY ARTICLES ON POVERTY, POLITICS, AND MATTERS OF CONSCIENCE CHECK OUT MY BLOG A LAWYER’S PRAYERS AT: https://alawyersprayers.com
Retrieved: https://avoicereclaimed.com/2019/03/03/returning-to-toxic-relationships-part-2/
It’s the disorder that robs people of their ability to feel whole.
When it comes to the disorder that can splinter people into discrete and fractious personalities, it’s important to note that this complex disorder is not uncommon.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, is often misdiagnosed. For the sufferer, the experience can be deeply confusing, with a distorted sense of self and long periods of time lost to dissociation.
Caused by childhood abuse, incest and neglect, the disorder often develops as a coping mechanism. It allows young kids to compartmentalize abuse so they can survive when caregivers or family members make them feel unsafe.
DID is described as a complex form of post-traumatic stress and dissociation, which causes a discontinuity in one’s self of self.
Professor Warwick Middleton is a leader in research and treatment on the disorder and has been working in the field for decades. Speaking to News.com.au, he recalls first writing a paper on the condition in 1991.
DID can be categorized as a developmental disorder, where a person’s personality fails to integrate as they develop.
It’s defined as an “identity disruption” and you may know it as “multiple personality disorder.” In some cultures, it may be identified as spiritual or demonic possession.
They have symptoms that you might have seen depicted in movies like “Sybil” or TV shows like “The United States of Tara.”
Sufferers of the disorder have a complex system of dissociation, which Middleton describes as “splitting off at different times into different identity states.”
“The individual might experience this as internal or external voices, which may argue and which may be associated with particular behaviors. Alternative handwritings. A whole spectrum of things,” he said.
What Middleton describes is a form of dissociation where the sufferer splits off into what appears to be a completely different “personalities.” Sufferers usually have at least two distinct personalities at some point in their life, some may have many more.
Middleton says that the majority of sufferers also fulfill criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression and somatization, while many of them have eating disorders and social phobias.
“Typically they present in their thirties, having bounced around the system for quite a while,” he said. “Because they hear voices … they’re given antipsychotics. From our research, about 20 percent of them are diagnosed with bipolar disorder.”
“If you look a bit closer they don’t have bipolar. That was just someone identifying them switching between different personality states.”
People who suffer from DID often have trouble remembering things.
In the autobiographical memory of their life, there are gaps where they have no recollection of what happened or what they did — and not in a regularly reported way, like when you drive home and arrive at your door with little recall of your journey.
It’s about losing big parts of your life to your other “personalities” who take over, commandeering your consciousness. While it might sound like the stuff of movies, the disorder is very real.
From Middleton’s research, he suggests it occurs in about 1.1 percent of the adult population. He describes this as being a “relatively common” condition.
“(People with DID) range in a spectrum — (there) are people who sort of live on the fringes of existence who are chronically mentally ill, bouncing around services to people who are very high achieving, who may work in mental health services themselves.”
Sufferers often report weeks or months of their life passing by them where they have no memory and feel no agency over what transpired in that period.”
In the early nineties, the disorder was not often diagnosed and hardly at all identified by mental health professionals. These days it is much more commonly diagnosed.
Middleton says his interest in the disorder developed because there was “very little clinical awareness” and it wasn’t a diagnosis routinely made.
The other problem was that the issue of family assault and “incest” wasn’t properly acknowledged within Australia, where he is based, at the time.
“We now know that incest is, unfortunately, very common,” Middleton said.
“Basically in every country in the world where systematic research is done into childhood trauma and the presence of dissociative disorders we get very similar patterns.”
He said with standard treatment like cognitive behavioral therapy, the outcomes are very poor for sufferers of this disorder.
Treatment options with good outcomes include phase-orientated treatment.
Middleton was the first person, along with his colleague Dr. Jeremy Butts to publish research linking childhood trauma with the presence of DID. This paper was published over 20 years ago in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.
He’s been a long-term director of the Society for Trauma and Dissociation.
Their findings showed that across the world, almost all sufferers of DID had, during childhood, suffered from some form of abuse, be it physical, sexual or neglect.
For more information on CPTSD and other issues visit our YouTube Channel
If you need support or would like to connect with like-minded people join our Private and Closed online Facebook Group for Child Abuse Survivors and those with CPTSD. Click here to join
The Memoir You Will Bear Witness is available on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback
Almost all of us have, at some time or other, run into an old flame and felt the desire to reconnect. What draws us is a mix of nostalgia and the desire to correct past mistakes, to “get it right” this time.
The problem is that many of the former relationships to which we find ourselves drawn as abuse survivors were, to put it mildly, toxic.
Why do we save the love letters of a man who repeatedly cheated on us? Why are we tempted to call the boyfriend who stole our charge cards and emptied our bank account? Why do we find ourselves checking Facebook for the ex who put us in the emergency room?
The answer is not that time heals all wounds. It is not that we are seeking closure, that we enjoy pain…or that we are simply too dim to know better.
One reason is familiarity. There is something powerfully familiar about these toxic relationships. They evoke buried memories from our past, memories we once associated with love.
Such memories are not generally in the forefront of our consciousness. But a woman whose father was sharp and impatient with her as a child is likely to choose a partner with the same shortcomings. A man whose mother was elusive and unresponsive is likely to find women with those qualities attractive.
The more closely an adult relationship mirrors the abuse we experienced in childhood, the more emotional power that relationship will hold for us. And the more appealing that partner will seem. It is as if we are wrestling with an irresistible force.
That force is not, however, love.
This series will continue next week.
FOR MORE OF MY ARTICLES ON POVERTY, POLITICS, AND MATTERS OF CONSCIENCE CHECK OUT MY BLOG A LAWYER’S PRAYERS AT: https://alawyersprayers.com
Retreieved: https://avoicereclaimed.com/2019/02/24/returning-to-toxic-relationships-part-1/
https://royalcommbbc.blog/2019/04/07/latest-institutions-to-join-the-national-redress-scheme/amp/
Support services
Link Up Queensland – 1800 200 855
Counselling, healing and culturally appropriate support for Indigenous Australians
Centre Against Sexual Violence – 07 3808 3299
Community based sexual assault service dedicated to serving the sexual assault support, education and information needs of the Logan, Beenleigh and Beaudesert communities
Micah Projects Inc – 07 3029 7000
A dedicated support service and resource centre for Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants
Relationships Australia QLD – 1800 552 127/1300 364 277
Family and relationship counselling as well as a range of specialist counselling services
Retrieved from https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/contact
Qld state given, other states available from this link.