Loving Your Inner Child When No One Else Does

A Candid, Inside Look, At The Experience Of Healing Dissociative Identity Disorder

My work in the mental health field is near and dear to my heart because I know what it’s like to struggle in the depths of darkness and to navigate the calm, sparkly seas of the good times and try to create a balance between it all.

The sparkly seas of calm are a part of the balance between the struggle and rest.

I went to college to study psychology and in my 4th year I entered a class where we had to role play as a therapist and the theoretical client I was given to practice on was a child molester. Given my dark and endless history with countless offenders against my child self, the idea of sitting in front of someone like my perpetrators and trying to help them drew a line in the sand for me that I couldn’t cross. Let’s face it, it was more than a line in the sand, it was a fortified brick wall a hundred meters thick reinforced by rebar and really anything else I could pack into the mortar. It wasn’t going to happen and I walked out of college and never looked back. My dream had been to help others and study the mind but that dream shattered into a thousand crumbled pieces that day. I knew that I could never, even on my best day, open a practice and have a child molester walk into my office and I would be of any benefit in their healing process. That wasn’t my calling or my dream.

I had made it through the class that required me to volunteer in Eastern State (mental) Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington helping patients and I managed to handle offenders that had assaulted someone, threw them through a windshield and been diagnosed with some of the worst diagnoses that can be handed out. Insanity, I could deal with. Assault, I could deal with but sexual violation of another human being (especially a child) was where my line was.

I managed over the years as I worked on my personal healing to regroup and discover that helping others with mental illness was still very much my dream and I felt uniquely qualified to help myriad people with nearly any diagnosis. I got my biggest lesson in this when my own son started exhibiting signs of schizophrenia and by age 18 was institutionalized and heavily medicated. My boy was spouting things I’d only heard from homeless people on city streets and it caused me to dig my heels in, roll up my sleeves and get back to who I wanted to be when I graduated high school. I began a mental health blog, gained 11,000 followers and I actually made a difference.

Then the truth of my entire family came crashing down all around me and all of the stories my mother had told my whole life and all of the things I had experienced but vehemently denied (or was told was just in my imagination) became a truth so heavy that I collapsed under the weight of it all only to have to find a shovel from within the rubble to dig myself out.

There I was again, reduced to fragments and forced to begin piecing myself back together. This time, the process was so deeply personal and crippling that what it was going to require of me was a love I had never known.

Enter the children.

The children weren’t kids in the neighborhood, they weren’t friends of my son, and they weren’t the kids on the playground at the nearby elementary school.

No, the children that entered my life were firmly encamped but expertly hidden inside of me. Every time a perpetrator had caused me harm when I was a child, a child part of me, some known literally as “fragments” in psychology vernacular, were split off and while they lived inside of my physical body and brain, they took up residence in places that helped to define them.

For the sake of inner safety, because my healing is ongoing, I will not outline where they reside but what I can do in order to offer clarity to you is use an example. A child that endured having their hands hit as punishment for not doing what was asked of them by a perpetrator, might express themselves in pain in the hands during a memory flashback. Of course there is no literal child in the hands, especially my hands as an adult woman, but there is a memory that is held by a child part that was terribly abused and punished by having harm caused to her hands. This pain can last a lifetime and as I have moved through my life, these child parts, if gone unnoticed (which most were until about 2011) became more and more concealed and unreachable.

If you’re a parent, when your child falls down and skins his knee, you rush to his side and dust him off and maybe even put a bandaid on him, right? Well, imagine if you turned your back on your little boy and left him to deal with

• what caused the fall

• the injury incurred

• the feelings he felt

• and the sadness he had because you had simply turned your back and ignored him

This example is very much like what happens to an abused child left to cope with the abuse taking place and the aftermath of it all. The psyche dissociates, or splits off, the part of the child enduring that abuse and it places that child somewhere and in my experience will even, on some level, place a neon sign pointing to the child part so that it can be found and healed at a later date—under the best of circumstances. In the worst of circumstances, this defense mechanism employed by the mind (and gifted by God, in my opinion) is a protective measure that is put in place so that child part never again has to endure that specific abuse in the same way because it now has a shelter to reside in. That, in a nutshell, is how a child part is formed and stored and then as a grown up seeking to heal, the task becomes about finding these parts and giving them what they needed in the moment that the abuse took place.

Let me place a big caution sign here:

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Delving into this kind of healing work without having trusted support at your side and even a therapist at the ready is not advisable. My most difficult work was accomplished because I had a knowledgeable therapist who literally allowed me to text him in the middle of the night if I needed to.

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A therapist’s role in the preliminary healing process is critical as sometimes you can break through to a child part of your self and the aftermath can require an impromptu 3-hour therapy session, a long drive in the country afterwards, and 16 hours of sleep just to kick off the revelation of that part and the reality it endured.

This is no joke and it takes a motivated and strong person to face it.

The other thing that it takes is love.

The love I speak of is akin to agape. Agape is defined as (from Wikipedia):

Agape (/ɑːˈɡɑːpeɪ, ˈɑːɡəˌpeɪ, ˈæɡə-/;^[1] from Ancient Greek ἀγάπη (agápē)) is "the highest form of love, charity" and "the love of God for [human beings] and of [human beings] for God".^[2] This is in contrast to philia, brotherly love, or philautia, self-love, as it embraces a profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance.

I want to highlight the last part of the definition that states that it is “a profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance”. I highlight that because it is what is required to face that you, as a child, went through something that was so difficult that your mind had to split itself and hide away in order to survive. It is required because what you discover about that child part of yourself might cause you, as an adult, a sense of shame or anger or some form of negative emotion that you want to shove it back into the hiding place you found it in. It is required because you may not want to believe the memory. However, this child part of you is crying out for help and you are going to need to exercise this level of love (and acceptance) in order to bring this child part back into the fold to add to the wholeness you’re trying to build within yourself that is paramount in this process.

Again, this is no joke and it isn’t easy but do you want the good news now?

This kind of healing work is the most rewarding work you will ever do. If you have ever had your own child or had a child in your care and you brought them to a place of healing and calm because you patched up a skinned knee and dried some tears and rocked the child in your arms, then you know just a fraction of the reward that you will feel when you help a child part of yourself heal from a traumatic experience.

Kids are cool. They’re resilient and they heal fast when there is a loving adult there to help them through and choosing to work on yourself and heal the traumatized child parts of yourself is exactly the same but with benefits. As you heal the child parts of yourself, you, as an adult, become more cohesive and your experience of the world becomes more complete. You also get to know just a touch of what God feels for you because you have chosen to love yourself unconditionally through the worst of it. You will be made into a better human being who, once on the road to healing, can turn around and offer a helping hand to others who have unhealed trauma and you will begin to know a peace that you never thought possible.

I can say all of this with confidence and authority because I have been there and done it. I can also say that even though it will test you, it will also empower and strengthen you.

With all of that being said, I want to leave you with three things.

1. I am here and will be providing resources to you throughout my work here at Substack and on my YouTube channel. I can also be contacted if you download the Signal app and click the QR code below.

   

2. If you want to help me help others, I have started a Go Fund Me (linked by clicking below the picture) that I have started.

   

   Click here to learn more.

   This money is not for my personal use and personal care. This money is to help the people who come to me in crisis who need help with medication co-pays or a therapy session with telehealth to get them through a difficult time, just to name two ways in which the money will be used. Yes, there are many resources out there available but many people still go without help because resources either aren’t accessible or are unreachable for some reason. I have had many people reach out to me at my YouTube channel and have even had someone come to my front door of my physical home for help. Your financial donation will help me get them the help they need.

3. I would love it if you would subscribe to my Substack and support me.

   Even as a free subscriber, your readership encourages me and empowers me to do more. Knowing that I am supported in my work helps me support others.

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I appreciate all of you who are here reading and supporting me. I’d love your support here and at my YouTube channel. I want to get back into my calling and the realizing of one of my lifelong dreams by helping those who are struggling with mental health issues. Thank you.