Children who have been brought up away from psychopaths, pedophiles, addicts, and people who are seriously mentally ill have no imagination of what what their lives would have been had they not been adopted. The best thing an adoptive family can do is help them become aware of what being the abused child in one of those types of families is actually like. And there are enough walk-in-the-shoes books by abuse survivors that are accessible to young teenagers to safely and openly and collaboratively get this 101 by proxy. 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 »

Sometimes the question is do you WANT to do it?
sometimes want is irrelevant and the question is do you NEED to do it?
sometimes whether you want or need is irrelevant and the question is COULD you do it?
and sometimes whether you want, need or believe you could is irrelevant
and the question is would you GIVE IT A TRY?

sometimes we pamper and pander and fail to teach children that each of these questions are relevant at different times and that it is a skill to recognise each and to know when one applies more than another. Read the rest of this entry »

My husband Chris and I are one of those couples people look at and get all ‘awww’ and ‘schucks’ and ‘you guys are just so cute’ about. And we are ‘old marrieds’, best pals, lovers, comrades, people who have shared a long 15 year journey together and just damned compatible and different enough to both glue us together and keep us being each our own person. So why didn’t we have kids? We were both childfree by choice – Dinks in urban slang today. But what were the nuts and bolts of that choice? Were his reasons for this choice the same as mine? And how did us being a childfree couple start out? Were we always this way, before we met, even since our teens, since our childhoods? Read the rest of this entry »