My Parts Are My Heroes
I’m Carol. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID for short. My counselor tells me that I am the core personality. I trust him so I’m taking his word for it. I call my team of protectors and parts The Gritty System. In the past, I stated that I have fourteen parts, but this isn’t accurate. Like a mother with too many kids to keep them all straight, I forgot some of my parts. I truly hope you and my parts forgive me for my blunder. I am trying to do better.
Today, I will be introducing my dissociated parts. As you read about them, please remember that they are all my protectors in all their flawed and quirky glory. They are parts of my basic and normal human nature that my abusers attacked and shamed me for having. To protect them and myself from further humiliation and abuse, I pushed that aspect of my fundamental humanity deep into my shadow self. Lost to my conscious control, they grew in many unexpected ways.
Dissociated Into My Shadow
In that shadow of disconnection, my parts took on a life of their own. Before I knew I had DID, I told my counselor that I always talk to myself, either out loud with my voice or silently inside my mind. I am always having a conversation with myself. When I laughingly told him that I hate it when I lose an argument with myself, he was not amused. In fact, his poker face could not hide his concern over this revelation.
It was such a normal part of my way of being that I had always assumed that everyone talks to and argues with themselves just like I do. I was stunned when he revealed that most people do not do this. His sincerity in his response left me feeling like I was a freak of nature. Did other people seriously not have conversations with themselves?
Five Years In The Backseat
That day, he told me that I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID for short. I was flooded with a tsunami of shame. All I heard was that I was so defective and broken that I would spend the rest of my life alone. To me, that translated directly into me having no value and no worth in the world. What person would ever want to date someone with DID?
Unable to face my shame and overwhelmed with the work required to heal, I hit my limit on what I could deal with. I bowed out. I didn’t want to exist anymore. My parts ran the show in my absence. While I was aware of most things, I did have a few blind spots when it came to my most dissociated parts.
That was five years ago. I have now taken back the reins and vow to not check out again. My parts are helping me get caught up on what I missed. I am so grateful to have them and even more grateful that I’m now strong enough and ready to do the work needed to heal.
Everyone Has Parts
My counselor told me that everyone has parts of themselves that they use in different ways for different reasons. He has a work part, a church part, a family part, a husband part, etc. Realizing that having parts wasn’t so abnormal actually helped me feel better.
The only difference between me and everyone else’s normal state of having parts is that I have amnesia between my parts. Other people are able to switch roles within the framework of being a singular identity while my parts evolved behind a trauma and shame fueled amnesia wall. That trauma and shame was so repetitive in my life that my dissociated parts took on a life of their own, eventually becoming capable of taking executive control over my body.
Bringing Down The Amnesia Walls
To heal, I need to reduce and eventually eliminate the amnesia between me and my parts. This requires a lot of shadow work to overcome the toxic shame that my abusers and rapists left me riddled with. Today, I am shamelessly introducing all of my wonderful, quirky, and amazing parts. I hope you find them just as amazing and brilliant as I do.
Rose
As a young child, my stepmother routinely starved me, sometimes locking me in a closet for up to two weeks at a time without food or water. Rose always came to my rescue. Sneaking out of the closet, she stole water and food from the kitchen whenever possible. She was not squeamish and would eat whatever she could find or steal. Sparing us the agony of slow starvation, she did whatever it took to get something on our stomachs.
As a starved child, Rose was and is my hero. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Rose. She is sassy and defiant and more than a little impulsive and mischievous. She most recently ordered five pounds of sugar free suckers from Amazon, claiming that we were starving her when we tried to go on a diet.
Trying to suppress Rose doesn’t work. I realize now that she can’t help her obsession with food so I’ve put her in full control of making sure we eat healthy. Our excess weight is killing us and I know this was not what she intended. She now shops the grocery sales and does all the cooking and cleaning afterward. She has taken to her new grown up responsibilities and we’ve lost 30 pounds so far with 70 more pounds we need to lose.
Grace
Formerly nicknamed Judge Judy by me and my other parts, Grace was our highly critical and caustic abuser interject. She demanded perfection in everything and would tear us down from the inside for everything that didn’t meet her standards. Sounding much like my cruel stepmother, she was just as savage in her verbal abuse towards not only me, but to those around me at times too.
The more I tried to suppress Grace, the more caustic and critical she became. The self abuse culminated in me cutting or burning myself to temporarily relieve my self-hatred and shame. I came to realize that Grace was a protector part that simply lost her way. Her original function was to protect me by finding and correcting anything that my abusers could use as ammunition to hurt me.
I told Grace that she was now inflicting more pain and damage on me, my parts, and my loved ones than my abusers ever could. She was horrified at what she was doing and had done. Now our biggest cheerleader, she shuts down any attempt at negative self-talk and urging me and my parts to love ourselves, flaws and all. She now uses her judgment for good by alerting us to the green, yellow, and red flags that we encounter in others.
Ann
Formerly known as Rage, Ann presented herself shrouded in a black mist that was both mysterious and terrifying in my inner world. Although she lived in a cave behind my inner waterfall, she could instantly materialize anywhere, laying waste to everyone and everything in her path. She broke many a television by throwing remotes and smashing windows and dishes before I could stop her.
My counselor gave me the suggestion of smashing dishes to purge my volcanic rage that constantly bubbled just beneath the surface, threatening to erupt that the slightest provocation. Screaming into a pillow wasn’t working so I was willing to try anything. Smashing dishes worked. I laughed and purged a lifetime of frustration and rage while using a sledgehammer to smash box after box of chipped dishes that I got for free or cheap at local garage sales. Picking out dishes to smash was almost as therapeutic as smashing them.
It worked. The black mist subsided and Ann revealed her true self. She loved me so much, but she couldn’t stand it when people abused me, disrespected me, and mistreated me. I suppressed her rightful anger in taking their abuse. She agreed to temper her rage and I agreed to allow her the right to stand up and protect us whenever we are being abused or attacked with the preferred method of handling abusive people being to remove them from my life.
Carol Ann
Carol Ann is our resident caretaker and doormat. Stripped of all healthy boundaries and guilted into never saying no, She routinely worked us into collapse over and over as our abusers and users exploited us. She liked being needed and nurturing was part of her nature, but this lack of healthy boundaries was killing all of us.
Carol Ann used alcohol to cope with the stress and exhaustion she felt, along with the massive guilt she felt when she told people no. She craved being appreciated and resented her stepmother and second husband for taking her for granted and treating her like a slave. My counselor helped her learn how to set and enforce healthy boundaries. This eventually led to her finally walking away from taking care of her abusive and cruel stepmother. Her stepmother passed away three years later. Word has it that she died of cancer complications. Carol Ann thinks she died because she carried around so much hate and could no longer purge that hate through her abuse of us.
After a much needed rest, Carol Ann is now stepping up to practice much needed self-care. She recently joined a gym and really loves tanning and using the massage tables. Treating herself to home manicures is now a weekly habit. Keeping our hair cut and trimmed as needed also helps. She is all for us reclaiming our feminine power and living our best life.
Beatrice
Beatrice, aka Bea for short, is our worker self. She gets stuff done. Sociable and responsible, she has a very masculine energy due to a lifetime of working in traditionally male dominated leadership roles and competing with men to prove herself worthy. While this competitive need to prove herself has helped her rise above her circumstances, it has also left her depleted of energy and very lonely.
It was a perfect recipe for burnout which she suffered time and again. After a layoff and her greenhouse business failing, Bea fell apart. With no work to keep the nightmares away, she had a total breakdown. It has taken years of rest and healing to finally venture back into work. She now works from home reselling used clothes and shoes on Ebay and Poshmark.
Although burnout is still a big worry along with protecting our fragile health, she is learning to set boundaries and limits on how much she works, making sure to give Carol Ann time for self-care and for other parts to have time to pursue their interests and healing. She is embracing her femininity and loves that reselling allows room for her to be a woman.
Carol Maxine
Carol Maxine is our social butterfly. She loves meeting people, making friends, and hanging out socially. Never meeting a stranger, she goes above and beyond to make everyone feel included, seen, and valued. She loves to be included and is devastated whenever she is left out or ignored. Her social drinking led to drunken blackouts where Cora would take over. That left her reeling with shame and humiliation, causing her to withdraw from the world.
Unable to cope, Carol Maxine sunk into a deep depression. She couldn’t face the mess she made of her life. Profoundly alone with no friends and no emotional support, the pain of living became too much for her to bear. Coupled with demands from her stepmother and her second husband, Mr. Nightmare for her to kill herself, she nearly ended it all. Fortunately, my other parts stepped in to save us just in time.
As a recovering alcoholic with seven years of sobriety, she has yet to engage in dating or making new friends. Where she once believed she was so defective that she had to allow people in her life based on their interest in doing so, she is now much choosier about who she lets into her inner sanctum. She is learning to have boundaries and makes it a priority to protect her peace by only engaging with people who share and support her vision, goals, and values.
Max
Max is our homesteader, handy-woman, and DIYer. Capable and smart, she is a social recluse, preferring to stay on the margins. Her father taught her from a very young age to never need a man for anything. As a result, she sees needing help as being weak. She shuns all things feminine as being weak, manipulative, cruel, and lazy, all the characteristics that her abusive stepmother embodies.
Trying to do everything by herself has left her exhausted and alone. Two years ago, she completely burned out. She sold all her livestock and farm animals, stopped gardening and canning, and quit working on all her remodeling projects around the house. With a growing dislike of mowing, she longs to sell our high maintenance house with the huge yard to move to a condo where someone else does all the work or maybe even just a house in a city with a much smaller yard to deal with.
Max realizes that she lost her way. She is tired of being masculine and that being feminine does not mean that she would be anything like her stepmother. On a mission to learn how to soften her edges, she wants to be the kind of feminine woman who could attract a masculine man. Having exhausted herself trying to fill the role of a man, she is not interested in doing this any longer.
Maxine
Maxine is our really smart part. She helped us do well in school and read an entire set of encyclopedias as a child. Openly defying my stepmother’s demand that we be dumb so that her own biological children could be seen as smarter than me, Maxine studied hard and got good grades anyway. Forced to do her older siblings’ homework before being allowed to do her own, Maxine excelled at mastering knowledge and subjects far beyond her own grade level.
My stepmother could not stand the thought of the hated family bastard doing better in life than her own biological children so she demanded that I drop out of college during my final semester. Maxine refused and became the first member of my family to graduate college, a feat she accomplished entirely on her own with no help from her parents.
Maxine longed to go to graduate school, but lacked the confidence in herself to even try for it. She has lived with that regret ever since. As she heals, her confidence is growing. She is now saving money for grad school tuition in the hopes that she can one day serve others as a mental health counselor.
Minnie
Minnie is my delightful, sweet child part. Curious and trusting to a fault, she can be a bit gullible in missing the red flags in others. Growing up in a world where being curious and trusting could be deadly, I dissociated my most precious and vulnerable aspects into Minnie to protect her from abusive stepmother and pedophile father. Then I forgot she existed so she has languished in a perpetual child state ever since.
Now I am trying to grow her up. Minnie has always been a sucker for stories so I buy audiobooks which she listens to with enthusiastic glee while I do other things. She soaks them all up like a sponge. Her current favorite is Robert Oxnam’s A Fractured Mind. She thinks she and Bobby could be great friends after she grows up a little more.
I am still very protective of Minnie, but I am realizing that she adds a lot of joy and delight to everything she touches. I look forward to the day when we integrate so I can bring her unbridled joy to everything we do. She looks forward to the day when she’s big enough to become a storyteller in her own right. I do too.
Baby
At nine months old, I was taken from my birth mother and forced to live with my biological father, his wife, and their two children. Baby remembers it all in frozen clarity and detail. After a long Jeep ride out of the distant countryside and the bustling city of Saigon, I was handed to a short haired, fat, acne scarred, rotted tooth, perfume laden, and chemical smelling imposter mother.
My real mother was skinny and beautiful with long, flowing black hair. With a loving smile that reached her eyes, my real mother smelled like clean rainwater and rich garden soil mingled with the fragrance of fresh cooked jasmine rice and new, clean fabric that she spent endless hours sewing together while hunched over at her sewing machine. Although my birth mother and stepmother were identical twins, they couldn’t have been more different as far as I was concerned.
Baby held memories of the horrific abuse of her stepmother’s numerous attempts to murder. She was afraid that murdering her directly would come back on her so she tried to do it in a covert way that would allow her to claim innocence. She also knew that Dad was a pedophile. To him, we were nothing more than fresh meat for him and his pedophile friends to pass around and enjoy for their own sick, twisted pleasure. Their hate and their cruelty shattered Baby’s mind into thousands of parts, pieces, and fragments.
Recovering Baby was my key to learning how my DID began. She is also my key to forgiving myself by showing me just how small, defenseless, and blameless I truly was when all the hatred and abuse began in my life. I am not to blame for what those monsters did to me, but I am responsible for doing the work to heal from it.
Blair
Blair is our resident protector and physical defender. She emerges when the chips are down and our ass is on the line. Her favorite song in Chinchilla’s Little Girl Gone. She is bound by our code of ethics. We do not attack. We only defend. Self-defense is not abuse. We have a right to defend ourselves regardless of who tries to say otherwise.
Blair has fought for my life and saved my ass more times than I express. She will forever be a part of whatever final integrated version of me there is. I’m grateful for that and for her help. Blair has proven herself time again to have her own darkness and shadow well under her conscious control. Although masculine in her energy, she is a strong woman who will not hesitate to defend herself and her loved ones.
I love her and I accept her entirely whole just as she is. I can only hope that whatever man I enter a relationship with will appreciate and cherish my Blair just as much as I do. She would gladly accept the leadership and strength of a good man and enjoy being able to rest and let down her guard and her hair in his protective presence. That is more than good enough for me.
Nothing
When I was very young, Nothing volunteered to share my stepmother’s abuse with me. I was too broken to turn her down. She took over my body while I stayed safe in the recesses of my inner world. As time wore on, I forgot about our agreement to share the suffering. In doing so, I forced her to face the lion’s share of the broom handle beatings, closet imprisonments, and starvation punishments all alone.
I eventually forgot that Nothing existed at all. Forgetting my promise to come back and save her once we were grown and it was safe to heal, I tried to act like Nothing never existed and that she wasn’t real. My cruelty towards Nothing hurt her more than all the beatings and starvations combined. I forgot my very best friend. She volunteered to help me even though she didn’t have to. I let her down and I struggle to forgive myself for being so selfish.
Nothing deserves all the kindness, love, admiration, and respect that I can muster. She deserves joy, peace, and acceptance. In giving her all the protection and goodness that she deserves, I give myself those same gifts. My mind is nothing short of amazing for the measures it took to protect my will to live. DID is a brilliant survival strategy of last resort, created by God to deliver me from evil. I am so grateful that God is watching over me.
Lora
Lora is a teenage part that holds all things soft and feminine that I pushed away into my shadow. I confused being feminine with being weak. Now I know nothing could be further from the truth. My stepmother was passive aggressive, manipulative, deceptive, weak, lazy, two-faced, bullying, cruel, and filled with thinly veiled hate. I wanted nothing to do with her and nothing to do with being female because of her.
Lora’s favorite movie is Dirty Dancing. She loves all things from that era of the late 50’s to the early 60’s. In high school, Lora fell in love with a handsome young man. Dad forced me to break up with him, but Lora pined for him all these years. In her healing, she has finally been able to let go of him and of the fantasy that they might one day get back together. She is also able to assert her need to be feminine while recruiting other parts to join her in this quest. I’ve joined her too.
There is great power and strength in being soft and feminine. I am bringing Lora out of my shadow self and learning how to embrace her by embracing my feminine nature.
Cora
Cora holds my sexual human nature. With a deep love of corsets and all things sensual, Cora has a sexual morality that differs from my own. She believes that what happens between consenting adults is perfectly okay with the key words being “consenting” and “adults”. I realize that she is made for human connection.
Cora has chosen celibacy for the past 7 years to give herself time to heal from our abusive second marriage. While she wants a healthy relationship for us, she realizes that it might not happen this late in her life. She doesn’t know if she can go the rest of her life without ever being loved or ever making love again. She argues that sometimes an imperfect connection is better than no connection at all and that it’s okay if Mr. Right turns out to be Mr. Right Now.
She demands room to be imperfect and protests the rules that I am trying to impose on her. While she wants more than just a hump and dump, her drive and need for connection is very powerful and primal. She needs room to not always get it right. This is something I’m struggling with. I still have a lot of baggage surrounding sex that I need to heal.
Luna
Luna is the part of me that was raped by my father and the Kiddie Rape Club. Throughout the years, she told so many people about Dad and my older brother raping us, but no one believed her. In high school, Luna disclosed that Dad was raping me. The lady from DHS told my father everything and refused to do anything to protect me. Dad threatened to kill us if we ever told anyone again. He said he would rather go to prison for my murder than for child molestation because of what the other prisoners would do to him if they found out what he was in for.
That lady was just one more person in a long line of adults and school officials who completely and utterly failed me throughout my life. Finally realizing that no one was ever going to save us, Luna stopped trusting adults. Instead, she buried away all knowledge of what was being done to us just as quickly as it was happening to protect us from Dad. She swallowed all the darkness so that I could function well enough to survive until we could escape my father and the Kiddie Rape Club when we turned 18.
Not having the memories or knowledge of the sexual abuse left me a sitting duck. I no longer knew that I needed to know to defend myself from my father, older brother, or stepmother. Later in life, I moved back to my hometown to flee Mr. Nightmare’s abuse only to step right into the beartrap of my family’s dysfunction once again.
Luna holds many traumatic memories that I must uncover if I am to ever be whole and healed. I’m terrified. What I already know is bad enough. I shudder to think of how much worse it could be. Deep down, I know there is more and I’m fighting hard to be strong enough to take knowing about it.
Thank You For Reading To The End
This is a super long post with a lot of information in it. Thank you for being interested in me, my life, and my parts. As you can see, they are absolute heroes. They made my survival possible. Thank you for joining me as I work hard to heal from the things that should have never happened to me. I am so grateful to be here.
I hope sharing my story and my journey helps others with DID, those who love someone with DID, and those who simply want to know more about DID. Sharing my story is incredibly difficult, but I hope doing so helps to end the stigma surrounding DID, trauma, childhood sexual abuse, incest, child abuse, rape, domestic violence, and mental health.
If you are interested in more content from The Gritty System, check out my Youtube channel. Just click on the icon below. You can also follow me on Facebook.
I love you all!