Shadow People in the Closet

Image Credit:  http://thehorrormoviesblog.com/2015/06/16/shadow-people/

I'm physically in the livingroom. My mom is with me. She's knitting and watching TV and I am working on DID awareness stuff and keeping up with the support group we run on Facebook for DID. I'm coughing, clearing my throat, and gasping for breath, Mama mumbles under her breath.

"I wish I could break into the closet and strangle them"

I heard her. To an outsider this makes no sense, but to me she just said "I love you." It takes a bit of the fear out of this scary situation. Mama is here. Mama is watching. Mama cares.

Our inside world has been through incredible changes since last August. One of these changes happened over the last month. It was the opening of a gate inside, a gate guarded by a sweet 3 year old. Olly had guarded her gate faithfully for almost 20 years, but time has a way of changing things. The gate opened when it was ready and we welcomed Olly, Sami, Trinity, Shiloh, and Andee. They are a group of sweet and fun little girls that we affectionately call the C-Continuum. They hold a lot of memories, triggers, and fears from the body's childhood years. They were not alone though.

Also behind that gate is a group of shadows. They are people but no one, not even the C-Continuum has ever seen them. They arrived some time after Sabrina posted Olly at that gate and they "shut off the lights" and made it cold. When the gate opened, the littlest ones chose to come out and join the rest of us. The shadows retreated into a closet and locked the little ones out. Or locked themselves in.

From that moment we get choking sensations a few times a week. It happens around eating, strong emotion, or at seemingly random times. There's never any actual lasting damage done, but it's uncomfortable and hard to fight through. At first I believed they wanted the body dead. Sami agreed and said that's definitely what they want. I had decided to leave them, and the entire closet, alone.

Over the last two weeks I've noticed an increase in posts in our group about "angry" or "challenging" alters and Brina and I have educated many about patience, love, and kindness when these parts don't seem to want it. So I was reading yet another post a minute ago while regaining my breath when it dawned on me.

We aren't taking our own advice. We need to show love, kindness, and patience. We need to remind them that the body is safe, our life is safe, and we are surrounded by love. Most of all, that they are welcome to join us and receive the safety and love.


-Kaysie

Childhood Sexual Abuse

Image credit: http://www.colorlines.com/content/what-you-need-know-about-childhood-sexual-abuse

The statistics in the image are heartbreaking and shock a lot of people. Childhood sexual abuse doesn't shock me. It doesn't stun me, and it doesn't surprise me. I never wonder how it could possibly happen. I never have wondered. I never will wonder.

As early as any of us can remember, this body was used sexually. We have hints of memories prior to the age of 3 years old. We have definite memories as early as 4 years old. It started so early and went on for so long that we grew up believing it was normal. Our abuser was in the home daily. Outside of the home he was a devout church member. He sang in the choir and was a deacon in the church. Friends love him, other kids thought we had the coolest step dad ever. He always seemed to be wonderful. He fixed bikes, went camping, took us on vacations, and videotaped all typical childhood events. To the outside we had the perfect family.

He never paid for what he did. The mother worked hard to defend him. The police said there simply wasn't enough evidence. Our case never made it into a statistic. The above statistic doesn't include us. If it doesn't include us, how many more cases like ours are not included? What are the actual numbers? How many children are being broke, split, and shattered because of not reporting? How many are being taught that help isn't coming because of not being believed?

Its time to pay closer attention to the world around us. You can make a difference to one child if you can save that one child. Had any family member really paid attention, we could have been saved too. Its not their fault, they didn't know. I just believe that a little more diligence, attention, and time can make a huge difference to a child. We don't have to save all children, but we can all save one. We removed our children from a situation that was abusive in other ways. They are now supported, healthy, and growing. We are here with them, yet we are not raising them. We have no ability to raise children. We are still small children ourselves.


Alayna

Memories of Mothers

Alayna woke up this morning. She was awake for about an hour when she realized that Sunday is Mother's Day. Our adopted mom is cool and we adore her and this will be our first Mother's Day with her.... but our bio mom doesn't inspire great thoughts or warm fuzzies. It was only a few minutes after thinking about it when Layna became overwhelmed and the posts and memories started coming. After hours of her reliving memories she made the choice to call our bio dad and talked to him about everything. He listened, as he always does, with patience and compassion. He had no part of the abuse, and no way of stopping it. He offered to help with remembering and dates. From there the rest of our day has been intense memory work, placing together times and years and people. 

Emotions are all over the place. Memories are in pieces. Pens and papers are everywhere. This headache is unreal.

That about sums it up.....

Carbs. We're mostly made up of multiple personalities and carbs. Lots of carbs. 

So lots has gone on. We moved. We left Denver and went west and it has been an amazing move. No move is without its challenges, and lets face it, we are pretty damn challenging. All in all though, its been an incredibly positive experience. 

Our walking is suffering but its been hard to find a routine and we are finding numbness in our right leg after 2 miles. So today I did one mile. Bella wants to get into a yoga routine. We like yoga, its fun. 

We're also knitting and learning to garden. Jenna is so incredibly excited about our gardens. We have starter plants growing in the garage. Totally excited about having a successful garden. Its a lot easier to garden since we are down 40lbs too. Still more to go but a great start. 

The flabby skin on our arms makes the body look 80 years old. The thighs too but that part we don't care about because pants hide that. The arms are tough for us but we'll figure that out somehow and at some point. 

Pictures will be coming of our garden experience.

Time Flies!

Its been over a month! I know, it sucks for me too. It turns out we despise trying to write a blog post on our cell phone. Our laptop is touchy and we really don't like being at the big computer with our back to the room, and the big computer takes forever to load stuff and its frustrating so we often don't bother. But then we don't write!  And Lord knows we need to write. We all do better writing and writing on paper isn't happening anymore.

Journaling is really helpful for most of us. Hand writing feels awkward and we all feel reluctant to have our thoughts laying around on paper. At least here we can make things private if we need to or want to, or we can share them with the world anytime we want to.

There are about 9 of us active right now.... they are....

Me (Kaysie)
Alayna
Jenna
Cadie
Lyssa
Hayley
Abby
Zoey
Bella

Bella isn't fronting at all unless absolutely necessary. The rest of us are handling day to day life as best we can. Its been tricky because we had to make the very hard choice to give our dog to our ex for reasons that are best for her....mostly health reasons. She was our therapy dog... our bond was tight and we miss her like crazy. Its only been a week but the chaos its created is nuts. Everything from feeling alone, abandoned, unsafe, unable to trust, attachment issues, and overwhelming sadness. I'm hoping it all starts to settle down soon.

Because everything is mixed up we have been working on new ways to stay connected and together. We have found a way to communicate outside when communication inside is tricky and the parents have been monitoring everything to make sure we can ask them whats been going on and they can help us out. They have been pretty patient too. We want to start writing more too.

Thats about it for now...

Kaysie

Reflection

So I just read an article. An article that caused some heavy thoughts and some goosebumps. I'll link the article to the bottom of my rambling because I want to process this out. In short summary, the article was about the author's opinion of comments made about a 14 year old girl who completed suicide after having a sexual relationship with her adult teacher. The author herself had a past filled with willing sex with adult men. She wrote that she was 25 before she realized that the men who consented to sex with her were pedophiles.

That struck a chord with me.  This body's first sexual partner was 40+ years old when the body was 4 years old. By 14 this body was having cyber and phone sex with grown men who knew the truth about our age. By 17 we had miscarried a baby, not with our original abuser, but from an adult man who introduced us to the BDSM lifestyle. One we entered willingly and thought we needed. At 18 we allowed ourselves to be prostituted.  We met our husband online at 17, married at 21, and had an active BDSM life with him until we hit mid 20s and started to realize that something wasn't right.

We consented to nearly everything.  We initiated a lot of it. We grew riskier at every turn. But looking back now, we weren't emotionally equipped to consent to sex. We had no business at all consenting to these relationships. I doubt if we are emotionally equipped to consent to sex now (one of many reasons we are no longer with said husband). 

We learned to use sex to manipulate situations at a very young age. We learned to submit to the desires of grown men in exchange for affection and we called that love.

What we didn't learn was boundaries.  We didn't learn self control. We didn't learn self respect, love, affection, or mutual desire. We didn't learn self worth or value. And it took until this year, when Mom and Dad took us in for it to become obvious to us.

Reading that article brought it all home for me. I'm not sure all of us get it now, but the article wrapped it up in a neat little package and threw a bow on it for me. It also explains our crazy strong reaction to our 46 year old neighbor having a relationship with the 17 year old across the street who has been in and out of the foster care system.  Yes, she's consenting, but she's got about 5 to 10 years before she really gets it. And I ache for her.  And I loathe him.

This protector gets its now.

Kaysie

http://www.xojane.com/issues/stacey-rambold-cherice-morales

When Memories Collide...

This post is going to contain graphic descriptions, sensitive subjects, DO NOT read if you can't stomach depravity...

Bout sums it up.....

So... we are currently separated from our husband and working on a divorce. We've been married for awhile and we separated once before 6 years later. The separation was the best possible thing for us however we found out we were pregnant a week after he left, and had massive medical problems during that pregnancy. By December of that year we started feeling a massive pull to reconcile. We couldn't eat, breathe, sleep, or function. We just believed we needed him back. We reconciled in January and by May we realized we made a huge mistake. Our relationship continued to deteriorate but it seemed that every December we would go through a period where we doubted that things were so bad and maybe even that we were exaggerating or making stuff up for it to seem so bad. We would try again to make our marriage work, only to realize that nothing was getting better. We had a family therapist for many of these years who was confirming that the relationship wasn't healthy. We just weren't getting it.  This year we walked away again (6 years from the first separation), and now its December and the familiar pull is happening again.

Yesterday Jessa decided to reach out for help on a Facebook group for people like us, to find out why this keeps happening in December. The conversation turned to 6 year cycles, return dates, half returns, and programming. Someone mentioned ritual abuse or spiritual abuse. From the moment Jessa read those words memories started flooding back. First in small fragments, and then like a damn broke. Memories are playing over and over on a big screen in our inner space. There's no pause button, no stop button, no way to slow it down or block it. We have the little girls in a safe place, away from the chaos but we all can't be there because someone has to run the body and live our life. So the 4 of us who are over the age of 10 (there's been a LOT of system changes since we last blogged) are rotating out and trying to figure out what to do.

I know that part of what we need to do is talk about it, but therapy is not an option for us. We simply can't feel safe and it would take months to feel safe enough with a therapist to talk about it. Mama and Daddy want us to open up and talk but we cant seem to bring ourselves to speak the words. Mama suggested writing about it, and I decided to take that suggestion and write it out.

So far that's proving to be challenging. My focus keeps wandering and  I keep forgetting what I'm doing. I keep trying to think it through but my thoughts jump around to other things. Even writing these sentences I'm finding myself thinking about 8 other things of which I could write. I'm just going to try and jump into it now and see what happens.

The first memory fragment was about a pagan style ceremony in our bedroom a bunch of years ago. There was a star on the floor, with a circle inside. The lights were off but there was a candle at each point in the circle. There was chanting and blood involved. We don't seem to have any memory of where the blood came from, how it ended, or what actually happened there. We are assuming that the first born child was in the room at the time, but we have no memory to confirm that or not. We are mostly positive that second born child was conceived around this time, possibly that night, based on what memories of that year and time frame we currently have. There were a few of those types of ceremonies. We can see other bedrooms we've had with him over the years, sage, salt, incense, pentacles, candles, tarot cards, knives.

That memory paved the way for a lot of others, most being highly sexual. Being whipped with a belt while holding a necklace with a pentacle charm. The guilt of our body becoming very turned on. No memory of why, just the vague clips. Some type of blood ceremony, using a cut on our upper arm. Blindfolds, chains, and candles. A brand, in a crescent moon. Piercings, candles, pentacles, and intimate acts with a dog. Tied down and blindfolded with a lit candle in our anus. Being choked with his penis, being spoon fed his cum mixed with some type of oatmeal or something that made it chunky. Him mixing his cum into a lot of our food. Having him urinate on us, many many many times. The collars that choked us and felt horrific. Being called pig, cow, and other degrading names while blindfolded and naked around others in a room. Being used sexually by him and other females. Being given pills to ensure our compliance, or to sedate us so that we could be used sexually without fight or emotion. Being dressed as a small child, diapered as a baby, bathroom use being forbidden to purposely create accidents. Being punished (spanked, corner time, and butt plugs inserted) when the accidents eventually happened. Being used sexually after accidents and punishments. Use of furniture being forbidden... always belonged on the floor. Fed from dog bowls sometimes. Crawled around, barked like a dog, and being required to hump his leg. Being tied to the bed at night with a chain and a locked ankle cuff. Showers in cold water, him urinating in our hair, being forced to lick his anus. Him saving drops of our blood, keeping locks of our hair, clippings from our fingernails, Him assuring us he would always be able to find us and get us with those items. Threatening to leave us so that we'd be alone and no one would ever want us after all we've done.  

I don't know what the right words are are to describe this, but taking advantage of littles in the system for sexual reasons. Waking up in the middle of the night to intercourse, often with the littles in the system. Manipulated into believing he could make spirits possess us, being punished for not trying hard enough at orgasm control, for not performing well enough, for not reaching a trance like state during beatings or whippings, being punished for healing too quickly from these "sessions", Comfort items (blankets, stuffed animals), food and drink, bathroom use, orgasms, all needed permission. Permission was often denied. Sleep often denied for 30+ hours, while being expected to work a full shift and take care of the girls.

The worst part,  I think, was being convinced that we wanted and needed it. That it was all going to make us be "good girls" and that it was necessary for our protection and best interest.  The guilt is overwhelming because our body will still react in a sexually positive way to these thoughts, memories, etc.