BEING THE CHILD OF A PARENT WITH RAD

This is a picture of me in mid 1963 BEFORE I WAS BORN… I’m the lump, probably around 6-7 months cooked. My mother would have been 19 in this pic. I suspect my father’s brother, my uncle, took the pic as he had the slide and I’d never seen it until this week. Finally, a baby picture of me with my mother. Read the rest of this entry »

We think of domestic violence as something done by deranged men. But it is something done by everyday people. Sometimes the perpetrator is male, other times female. In our house, growing up, it was my father’s violence that snatched the headlines. My mother’s violence was considered ‘justified’. Read the rest of this entry »

My father was diverse. He was a lover of art, kind, responsible, generous, romantic, nostalgic and loyal. He was inspiring, colorful, creative, funny, silly, wild, manic and grandiose. He was childish, self pitying, pouty. He was deranged, perverse, immoral, dangerous. He was compulsive, conscientious, resilient and competitive. He was a father and a madman, a child and a maniac, a workaholic and a fighter, a gambler and a binge drinker, and he was Bacchus. Read the rest of this entry »

Such a sweet child, a dancing doll….
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When I think about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) I tend to think about adults who survived severe abuse at the hands of severely mentally ill carers as this is the most usual (but not the only) cause of severe early trauma. I don’t think about whether someone with undiagnosed DID may have had children and if they did, what would it be like for their children. I don’t think about that because I’m among the 70% of people who grew up abused who did not repeat that abuse on their children – but I also didn’t have children. Read the rest of this entry »

When I think about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) I tend to think about adults who survived severe abuse at the hands of severely mentally ill carers as this is the most usual (but not the only) cause of severe early trauma. I don’t think about whether someone with undiagnosed DID may have had children and if they did, what would it be like for their children. I don’t think about that because I’m among the 70% of people who grew up abused who did not repeat that abuse on their children – but I also didn’t have children. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Legion Theory we are all multiple. The only difference is that most people have integration of their parts into the whole which presents as ‘one self’. To use some analogies, their ‘quilt’ is not a patchwork quilt. Their ‘vase’ is not glued together, it was and remains a little chipped, a little touched up, but it is whole. Dissociative disorders can effect any of us at any time given extreme enough circumstances and the right predispositions. Read the rest of this entry »

Saw this meme on Facebook and as someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, it rang true at a whole other level. Read the rest of this entry »

Usually life moves in small steps… sometimes life changes so completely, so suddenly, overnight, within a week, within a month… and who you were has no place in who you are now suddenly meant to be. But when you were does not die… it gets suppressed, left behind, shelved within your own world… still waiting for the continuity of its own life… as another you develops in accordance with the new situation, environment, expectations. Read the rest of this entry »