Patricia, I don't know you, but I feel like I can identify with much of what you say, here in this thread, and in others on this board.

Have you ever looked into the idea of an ego state disorder? It's like a less distinctive form of multiple personalities, whereas instead of individual identities, the personalities are all you. You know that the alters are you, but they represent ego structures that formed during dissociative episodes. They can be distinct enough to even have their own memories (i.e. you feel like you have "lost time" episodes), or they can share their memories with one another (you have multiple versions of "what happened"). They're lost in time, though, these ego state 'fragments'. They represent perspectives formed under specific circumstances, so there could be an ego state that is representative of the thinking of a young child, or an immature adult, or any other period when trauma existed. They come to you across time, because time does not define them. Because of this timelessness, you can heal old wounds in the here and now, by treating yourself now as you needed then, when the dissociation came into being.

As I've built a scaffold of cognitive structures which allowed me to observe myself transitioning in and out of these alternate ego states, the mere act of validating their existence was very healing for me. I recently experienced some severe and repeated triggering, but I came out of that process transformed. I have been changed by it, the simple act of observing. And, of course, by honouring the past experience that generated the fragment. I feel like I can cry my final tears, now. And the fragment(s) re-integrate(s) with the entity I think of when I think of me. My ego re-absorbs the fragment(s). The merged self understands why.

Only after it happened, this sense of re-integration of my fragments, did I look into the literature. Lo and behold, there are therapies designed to produce just the sort of catharsis that I recently experienced.

What I'm trying to offer you is hope. You *can* heal from traumatic dissociation.

It's a lot to get your head around, I know. Here's a link to one specific treatment paradigm, called DNMS. (There are others, e.g. Michenbaum.) I kind of just "winged it", on my own, but you can get the gist of the process by studying what is involved in this example of cognitive reprocessing therapy for traumatic dissociation. There is a lot more, on this site, too. http://www.dnmsinstitute.com/dnms-summary.html

I hope that made some sense. I hope it gives some hope.

Hugs,
Lar