FooZe,

There are no stupid questions, just people who need more information. I do not have a simple answer to this important question. I've been told how important it is for us to communicate inside with those in our systems of alts.

For a long time I ignored my insiders, so they sent bad feelings, bad dreams, body pain and sickness and stress in relationships to try to get my attention. Eventually I began seeking help. It has taken a long, long time because I had alters whose job was to deny that anything was wrong and others who had pain and specific memories of the past and so it got very chaotic inside of me. My T kept explaining and kept asking questions and then different ones began to talk with my T.

I have DID friends who can see their alts and sometimes they have a house or castle or someplace the alts live together inside their mind. I do not have that. We turned the lights out inside and have lived in the dark since we were toddlers. (if we can't see you maybe you can't see us...) We did this to live. We saw death and violence and we have had a complicated system of different alts to handle it all. Over 14 years we gradually began to trust God and our T and let them help us to believe the different parts of ourself as they shared their experiences and feelings. We had to lay down our strong sense of denial. The denial was an important part of how I survived my childhood, but it was stopping me from recovering as an adult. Denial was how I could deny the nightmare of violence in the nights and get up and go to school the next day without letting on what we saw and did. They told us we would die painfully and slowly if we EVER let on and we believed them because we saw death. When denial stopped interfering we began to believe our own insanely awful past history and began to deal with the real damage done to us.

We heard and communicated better inside as we accepted help from both God and our T (our abuse had strongly sacreligious elements and we needed spiritual help to deal with this abuse, that is all i can say here)

SOO, very long story shorter, when we got to this forum and another one for DID we began to let the inside speak up and say WHATEVER they felt they needed to say and it got messy, rude and profane at times. As the adult parts and the denial parts apologised, so to speak to the little ones - they began to trust us and our recovery speeded up significantly.

I hope my answer did not confuse you, but this is how it has been for me and it seems many survivors do it in their own unique fashion - no two just alike. I know some people hold dialogues with their inside family and they set up orderly ways to talk and meet needs. Frankly, I'm still not able to directly do that. However, I say things out loud sometimes (while feeling kinda silly) and tell my insiders how PROUD I AM OF THEM and how much I hate what they went through and how we ARE ALL GONNA GET WELL TOGETHER. Over time they have believed me, accepted help from my T and God and things have been changing in good ways. We are getting well!

Your question is actually VERY IMPORTANT, FooZe and I hope you begin to experience some internal communication of your own. There could already be such communication and you may not have realized that was what it is. Sometimes I used to think I was just daydreaming but it was really someone inside trying to get my attention. Thank you for asking and letting me talk about the way we are.

Leslie/Pixies