Inside Karen’s Crowded Mind

Be free and be whole. Those who mistreated you should receive justice. That's part of your therapy; knowing that those who love evil and mistreat others are exposed and brought to justice. Your testimony is needed to liberate others in the same situation; to illuminate these ills of our nation. If you have the strength, continue to tell your story. Make it known. And expose those who mistrated you. And, may the GOD of Heaven comfort you and bring about in you a peace and comfort that is beyond what any therapist can do. Thank you for your courage.

Oh for heavens sake! Queenieinc - get a life! There is not a second of the past that can be changed or relived. Try some congnitive therapy that will allow you to live for today and the future. Some people have real abuse, some people are brainwashed into believing they were abused.
WHO CARES!
Move forward and quit whinning!
If people can survive death camps, (always) remember their abuse, but decide to put them on the back burner, and live fruitful lives, you too can forge ahead!

What a horrifying story, I cannot imagine anyone doing that to a child, I hope her father and grandfather rot in hell! Bravo to Dr Baer, his work with this patient.The success with her alone should make all of his sacrifices he made to become a therapist worth it.

I can't even read this article, let alone the comments. I avoided therapists, I don't trust them, none of me do, never have. I've worked very hard at becoming sane and functional. I've had more personalities than I could count, because some weren't complete. I have three left, with a fourth facture that serves her purpose. I'm done integrating, at this point it would be psychological suicide of two, which one lives? Forget it. Everyone is a little nuts to some degree anyway. I can tell you the time and purpose for the first split and every one there after. I can tell you the purpose for choosing to integrate. This was a useful psychological tool for coping with something that could not otherwise have been dealt with. What would I have done without it? God only knows, but it terrifies me to think of having to had coped with childhood, my infancy, without this option.

I know it exists, I have seen professionals that suffer from it that have just been dismissed as Borderlines. It is hard to treat, Most are not acting!

i know to those who havethis it seems like they are messed up and it is true you dont function like every one else and have to accomodate for living a different kind of existence, but this is a highly evolved way of surviving trauma the brain is amazingly capable and people that do survive in this way are very intelligent. we just seem messed up by people who can't begin to understand what has happened. so we need to beleive in ourselves an our amazing selves.

This is a very tricky diagnosis or should I say label. Individuals suffering from DIssociative Identity Disorder take on "alters" as a way to survive trauma. They have taken on a survival tactic which helps them to "cope" with this trauma, whether this form of "coping" is seen as healthy or not. I think that DID is another mental illness that is just as stigmatizing as all other mental illnesses and I bellieve we need to move away from "glamorizing" these disorders and begin addressing the societal issue of stigma and mental illness. After all, these individuals are human beings first.

I read a book some time ago about a woman who had 52 personalities. The book was written from a true story. I can understand why this woman created the alter egos just to survive. The things visited upon this woman were atrocious. The book told of the horrors she went through. It told of a dr who helped her. She wanted him to film her in her other personalities so she could show people what happens when children are abused. So fathers can understand what they do to their children and mothers can see what happens when they refuse to admit anything is happening. This poor woman almost died getting well and she had to find a way to convince all of her personalities that the person who caused all of the pain was stopped in order for her to find peace. They used the documentary in classes where men who had abused their children and were attending a class (like anger management, only it was sexual management) had to watch the documentary in order to understand the dire consequences of their actions.

My heart truly bleed s for her no child should ever have to be expose to that kind of abuse or any kind for that matter ..I pray that she may find some peace of mind...God bless

I read a book some time ago about a woman who had 52 personalities. The book was written from a true story. I can understand why this woman created the alter egos just to survive. The things visited upon this woman were atrocious. The book told of the horrors she went through. It told of a dr who helped her. She wanted him to film her in her other personalities so she could show people what happens when children are abused. So fathers can understand what they do to their children and mothers can see what happens when they refuse to admit anything is happening. This poor woman almost died getting well and she had to find a way to convince all of her personalities that the person who caused all of the pain was stopped in order for her to find peace. They used the documentary in classes where men who had abused their children and were attending a class (like anger management, only it was sexual management) had to watch the documentary in order to understand the dire consequences of their actions.

I avoided therapy thanks to an early phobia of being locked up. I saw "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as a child and by then, I already knew that I was fractured. I can tell you the moment and purpose for the first split. I can define every other after that. It was after the birth of my first son that I realized that I had to choose sanity, for his sake. I began my first steps into emotion, and the first things I began feeling were the intense pain and fear and trauma that I had avoided all those years. I slipped right into hallucinations of being an infant, raped by an adult cousin until I was four. After that, I became something of a target for pedophiles because they knew I wouldn't tell. Telling just made things messy and complicated. Eventually, with self-hypnosis, I worked myself into a unified whole, but the internal arguments over whose turn it was to be at any given moment was more maddening than the lost memories and the confusion of family and friends. I made a firm pact with myself, we all had my son's best interest's in mind. I settled on one name, legally. By the time my third child was born and just a few months old, the arguments inside of me were over. LEaving and divorcing my schizophrenic husband helped, but to be sure, there was a time when he was my hero and rocked me through my worst PTSD episodes. I was down to three fully cooperating personalities a little more than ten years ago. I have three different versions of the same name. (There is a fourth that is not a full personality and does not have a name, just a description.) Each of me is able to handle life's difficulties as they came. At this stage, I don't want to integrate further, it would be like a psychological suicide. I am struggling though, to maintain through a 40 hour work week doing the same job. I've never succeeded. So I operate at several different part-time jobs. I am not ready to confess to most of my family, I think some would use it to declare me an unfit mother. I have one child left at home, a 12 yo who understands. I have a boyfriend whom I've recently confessed to, and the confession has made the relationship better because now he understands my *moods*. I've given myself until my 40th birthday, not far away, to get things together before seeking *real* therapy. For those who think this came from sympathetic therapists, all I can say is, what therapy?

I avoided therapy thanks to an early phobia of being locked up. I saw "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as a child and by then, I already knew that I was fractured. I can tell you the moment and purpose for the first split. I can define every other after that. It was after the birth of my first son that I realized that I had to choose sanity, for his sake. I began my first steps into emotion, and the first things I began feeling were the intense pain and fear and trauma that I had avoided all those years. I slipped right into hallucinations of being an infant, raped by an adult cousin until I was four. After that, I became something of a target for pedophiles because they knew I wouldn't tell. Telling just made things messy and complicated. Eventually, with self-hypnosis, I worked myself into a unified whole, but the internal arguments over whose turn it was to be at any given moment was more maddening than the lost memories and the confusion of family and friends. I made a firm pact with myself, we all had my son's best interest's in mind. I settled on one name, legally. By the time my third child was born and just a few months old, the arguments inside of me were over. LEaving and divorcing my schizophrenic husband helped, but to be sure, there was a time when he was my hero and rocked me through my worst PTSD episodes. I was down to three fully cooperating personalities a little more than ten years ago. I have three different versions of the same name. (There is a fourth that is not a full personality and does not have a name, just a description.) Each of me is able to handle life's difficulties as they came. At this stage, I don't want to integrate further, it would be like a psychological suicide. I am struggling though, to maintain through a 40 hour work week doing the same job. I've never succeeded. So I operate at several different part-time jobs. I am not ready to confess to most of my family, I think some would use it to declare me an unfit mother. I have one child left at home, a 12 yo who understands. I have a boyfriend whom I've recently confessed to, and the confession has made the relationship better because now he understands my *moods*. I've given myself until my 40th birthday, not far away, to get things together before seeking *real* therapy. For those who think this came from sympathetic therapists, all I can say is, what therapy?

I avoided therapy thanks to an early phobia of being locked up. I saw "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as a child and by then, I already knew that I was fractured. I can tell you the moment and purpose for the first split. I can define every other after that. It was after the birth of my first son that I realized that I had to choose sanity, for his sake. I began my first steps into emotion, and the first things I began feeling were the intense pain and fear and trauma that I had avoided all those years. I slipped right into hallucinations of being an infant, raped by an adult cousin until I was four. After that, I became something of a target for pedophiles because they knew I wouldn't tell. Telling just made things messy and complicated. Eventually, with self-hypnosis, I worked myself into a unified whole, but the internal arguments over whose turn it was to be at any given moment was more maddening than the lost memories and the confusion of family and friends. I made a firm pact with myself, we all had my son's best interest's in mind. I settled on one name, legally. By the time my third child was born and just a few months old, the arguments inside of me were over. LEaving and divorcing my schizophrenic husband helped, but to be sure, there was a time when he was my hero and rocked me through my worst PTSD episodes. I was down to three fully cooperating personalities a little more than ten years ago. I have three different versions of the same name. (There is a fourth that is not a full personality and does not have a name, just a description.) Each of me is able to handle life's difficulties as they came. At this stage, I don't want to integrate further, it would be like a psychological suicide. I am struggling though, to maintain through a 40 hour work week doing the same job. I've never succeeded. So I operate at several different part-time jobs. I am not ready to confess to most of my family, I think some would use it to declare me an unfit mother. I have one child left at home, a 12 yo who understands. I have a boyfriend whom I've recently confessed to, and the confession has made the relationship better because now he understands my *moods*. I've given myself until my 40th birthday, not far away, to get things together before seeking *real* therapy. For those who think this came from sympathetic therapists, all I can say is, what therapy?

Serenity14 we are of the same mind tonight. I am really beside myself with some of the comments, actually with a lot of the comments tonight. It is a long, difficult process going back in time and looking at and reliving all the abuse that happened. I can do it some days and others I can't. I have a wonderful psychiatrist that I have been seeing for 9 years, starting with major depression. She is out of the country at the moment and I am truly missing her. I work hard at surviving each day and attempting to live a "normal" life. Right now that is not possible.I hope you are doing well and will show great recovery with the therapist you are now working with. Do I believe recovery is possible? Yes, I do, but I think it takes a lot of hard work and patience. Thank God for my husband and children and for my doctor. I don't know if I could have survived this without them.

I avoided therapy thanks to an early phobia of being locked up. I saw "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as a child and by then, I already knew that I was fractured. I can tell you the moment and purpose for the first split. I can define every other after that. It was after the birth of my first son that I realized that I had to choose sanity, for his sake. I began my first steps into emotion, and the first things I began feeling were the intense pain and fear and trauma that I had avoided all those years. I slipped right into hallucinations of being an infant, raped by an adult cousin until I was four. After that, I became something of a target for pedophiles because they knew I wouldn't tell. Telling just made things messy and complicated. Eventually, with self-hypnosis, I worked myself into a unified whole, but the internal arguments over whose turn it was to be at any given moment was more maddening than the lost memories and the confusion of family and friends. I made a firm pact with myself, we all had my son's best interest's in mind. I settled on one name, legally. By the time my third child was born and just a few months old, the arguments inside of me were over. LEaving and divorcing my schizophrenic husband helped, but to be sure, there was a time when he was my hero and rocked me through my worst PTSD episodes. I was down to three fully cooperating personalities a little more than ten years ago. I have three different versions of the same name. (There is a fourth that is not a full personality and does not have a name, just a description.) Each of me is able to handle life's difficulties as they came. At this stage, I don't want to integrate further, it would be like a psychological suicide. I am struggling though, to maintain through a 40 hour work week doing the same job. I've never succeeded. So I operate at several different part-time jobs. I am not ready to confess to most of my family, I think some would use it to declare me an unfit mother. I have one child left at home, a 12 yo who understands. I have a boyfriend whom I've recently confessed to, and the confession has made the relationship better because now he understands my *moods*. I've given myself until my 40th birthday, not far away, to get things together before seeking *real* therapy. For those who think this came from sympathetic therapists, all I can say is, what therapy?

I have seen this MPD on several occasions since the early 1980's working with Vietnam veterans, particularly when I served as a Veterans Council for the Vietnam Veterans of America. In one experience I recall very clearly, one veteran, with paranoiac features, would periodically change personalities in the middle of a sentence without breaking continuity. It was really weird and gave me goose pimples.

Dear joanastrid, The day I realized that this was why I had no idea who I really was and my personality was so fractured I was completely devastated. I was bulemic and self mutilating way before it was suggested and my doctor had no idea why I vomited all the time. He certainly had no clue as to why. I coudn't tell him why I was SO sad.... I HAD NO IDEA . When I reached age 32, 1989-90, I recovered memories, not in a therapists chair. That would have been so much safer. I had no one to help me or my husband or children through the mess I was in. It is not always a diagnosis of convienence. I am sure that like most lazy or inept practitioners, there are those that use the diagnosis as a catch-all term. How tragic. I can only speak from personal experience, I left therapy, I couldn't afford it, I didn't want to be labelled and I am think I did OK getting to the bottom of things with the support of family and friends, as well as self awareness. I know when I'm not myself. I apologize when I lose it... but I don't tell people why. No one really wants to know. Please don't be so insensitive, this is real and not everyone is chasing the diagnosis of the day.