I was born in the back hills of the Appalachian mountains. My father was a pastor to a small congregation and a missionary to the unchurched mountain people. My mother was a native to the state we lived in and her home where she grew up was located less than 50 miles from where my dad pastored when I was born. My extended family on my mother’s side is very large and remained close knit through all my growing up years.
I have two older brothers and a younger sister. My brother who is two years older than me was born with many birth defects and needed numerous surgeries that were sometimes followed by extensive rehabilitations. This made it necessary for my oldest brother and me to be left in the care of people other than my parents for weeks or months at a time – sometimes it was with relatives and other times it was with people my parents trusted. My parent’s trust was not always merited, and I developed extreme abandonment issues as a young infant. This led to the development of separate personalities before my first birthday.
My father’s profession required us to move geographically several times while I was growing up. Each time we moved there were cultural and social changes that were hard for me to adapt to.
My teen years were especially turbulent. The multiplicity was well developed enabling me to live very separate and diverse lives.
I attended college following high school graduation. I completed what would normally take 6 1/2 years to complete in just 4 years. For most of my junior year my father’s mother lived with us because of debilitating strokes. My mother taught me how to care for her. It was also during my junior year that my mother was diagnosed with cancer. The fall semester of my senior year I took 18 credits, did my student teaching, and helped my father take care of my mother who was extremely ill from the cancer. She passed away very early in 1980, and the day she died I experienced a massive physical collapse. Against my doctor’s wishes I took the final 18 credits needed to graduate with two teacher certifications and all that was needed for a third certification except one 3 credit graduate course. I also planned and prepared for my wedding. The combination of all these factors together proved to be too much for me. Switching personalities interfered with my ability to function instead of aiding it, and I failed a course that I should have been able to pass easily without ever attending a class. I got married the day I would have graduated and moved 700 miles from where I had been living at the time.
Although there had been no hint of hidden anger prior to the wedding, three weeks after the wedding my new husband viciously verbally attacked me. When I asked him where that had come from, he told me I had it coming to me for forcing him to deceive me before the wedding because if he had been honest with me before the wedding I wouldn’t have married him. A week later the blows became physical. A couple weeks later I found out I was pregnant, and within a few weeks after that I miscarried the baby.
That fall we moved again so my new husband could start seminary training, and I started my first teaching position in public school. When I got pregnant again it became necessary to move closer to my place of employment. I managed to carry this baby to term but I lost 30 lbs. due to pregnancy related illness. The baby was born 5 weeks post mature and had complications from infection in the amniotic fluids.
The abuse continued over the life of the marriage which lasted 13 years. During that time we were in and out of marriage counseling. My husband pastored three churches and was fired from all three positions. He was very intelligent and skilled at manipulating me and circumstances so that it appeared to anyone looking at our marriage from the outside that I was the cause of crisis our family was perpetually in. When I reported the abuse to people who were in a position to hold my husband accountable for his behavior, they did not believe me.
Up until I was pregnant with our youngest surviving child, I held a resistance that I can only describe as an inner wall of defense to protect my soul from the abuse. As that pregnancy progressed I felt like my wall of protection was getting thin and fragile. The marriage counselor we were seeing at the time was very concerned about this and emphatically encouraged my husband to stop the abuse immediately but his words fell on deaf ears. I had a severe post-partum depression following the birth of our youngest child and that started me on the path toward renewed health.
The first few years were very rocky. My first psychiatric “hospitalization” wasn’t really in a hospital because the psychiatrist treating me felt that my condition was too fragile to survive a state institution, which was the only hospitalization available to me at the time. Instead, my father came to live with us for 4 months to take over my responsibilities for the home and children. A friend drove me the 50+ miles to the psychiatrist’s office 3-4 times a week. When my husband was fired from that church and he was unable to get another job in the area, we relocated again. We moved several times over the course of the next few years. Each time we moved I had to locate a new medical doctor, a new therapist, and psychiatrist because I was on anti-depressants. My physical health also deteriorated significantly and there were hospitalizations for medical concerns, too.
It was during this season of seemingly endless crisis that I was sent to a psychiatric hospitalization program called Rapha (God, our Healer) where I learned foundational concepts that would be the under girding for real healing to begin. At Rapha I also learned that I needed to see a different counselor so I started seeing one recommended by Rapha. Since this counselor wasn’t able to prescribe medications, I also needed to see a new psychiatrist.
By this time the list of psychiatrist I had seen was growing rather large. Each one seemed to have a different opinion on what my core psychiatric illness or disorder was. Up until now all of them had ignored the symptoms that troubled me the most, so when I went through the list of complaints with this new psychiatrist, I didn’t mention the symptoms that had previously been ignored; but this time he asked me if I ever experienced them. Thus a new relationship began that continued until just over a year ago.
About the same time I began seeing this new psychiatrist, my husband and I started seeing a new marriage counselor. In one of the earlier sessions she described our relationship as my husband and I being at a beach and I was in the water drowning. She asked him where he would place himself and he replied that he was lounging on the beach. She tried to get him to see that he needed to go to my rescue or get help or something, but he refused to do anything but lounge. He told her he was intentionally sabotaging my mental health – purposely pushing me past my ability to cope because if I got healthy I would divorce him. He repeated this statement to my psychiatrist tying it to my mental health. I tried hard privately and in counseling sessions to get him to understand that his attacks on me were driving me to make that decision. About a year later I initiated a yearlong separation during which he had very little responsibility to the children or me and his primary focus was supposed to be on dealing with his out-of-control rage. At the end of that year I asked him what he thought it would take to make our marriage work, and he said the children and I would have to accept that he wasn’t able to control his anger and adjust our lives accordingly. This was unacceptable to me, and I was contemplating how and when I would make this clear to him when a situation occurred that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and I filed for divorce.
The next five years the children and I lived with my sister and her family. Although I was present with my children, my sister took over most of the parenting responsibilities and I focused primarily on getting healthy enough to take care of the children alone.
During one of the many hospital stays I began a friendship with a very special Christian man. I was very determined to keep this relationship healthy, which meant that we could only progress in the friendship to the extent that I could contribute as much to the relationship as I received. This man had his own reasons for wanting the relationship to grow slowly over time, and it worked out very well for both of us.
About 5 years after the friendship began I had made significant strides in my healing journey, and we decided we wanted to start a dating relationship. At about the same time my counselor and I felt it was time for me to take on more of the responsibilities of care for my children. When I expressed this to my sister, she had a very hard time with it. So it was that my relationship with my sister became very disrupted while my relationship with my friend grew stronger and more romantic in nature.
About a year into my dating relationship an incident happened with my sister that culminated in me being hospitalized against my will and my sister refusing to allow me to return to her home. My friend owned a home that was divided into an upper and lower apartment, and there was not anyone renting the upstairs apartment at the time of crisis with my sister, so I moved into the upper apartment.
A short time later we needed to adjust the living situation with my children who had continued to live with my sister when I moved into the apartment above my friend. I had applied for housing assistance in readying to provide a home for my family, but my application and information was lost when they changed from a paper process to a computer process, so I had no financial means to provide a home for my children. My friend came to my rescue big time when he opened his home up so I could sleep on the couch and keep my clothes in the bathroom closet while we moved the girls into one room of the upstairs flat and the boys into the other room. My friend and I had just started talking about the possibility of getting married but we didn’t want this crisis to push us into making that choice prematurely, so the temporary arrangement of sharing the house was a workable solution.
We did get married about a year after the crisis moves, and we have been very happily married since then.
The children are all adults now. Some have started families of their own. Others are living independently.
I intentionally left out the DID diagnosis from this over view because I plan to amplify this synopsis over time and incorporate the details into the story. Different personalities will share their own perspectives of the events of my life, along with antidotes that we hope you will enjoy.