1. Yes We Are. A Beginning.

NOTE: Each alter’s name has a number

after it the first time

it is on the page to show

which group s/he belongs to.

See the right of this page for the group.

Most of us didn’t know about most of us. What we mean is some of us knew about some of the others but not about others. What we mean is .... oh hell let’s go back to the beginning.

We have multiple personalities. It used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD. Now it is called Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID.

So this means that we are a “we”, more than an “I”, more than one “I”. Our name, Caer, is all of us put together. No single one of us is actually called “Caer”. We all have our own names. And all of us make up “Caer”, a name we chose together. Sometimes we call ourselves The Web or The Webers (as in our last name). It is harder and awkward for us to use the pronoun “I” when talking about us, because, as we have said, we are more than just one “I”, but we do it most of the time so as not to confuse people. We also use “I” when we don’t want people to know we are multiple. However, in this blog, we will use “we” most of the time. If we use “I”, then we will try to remember who that “I” is and give you their name – with their permission of course.

We will also try to define the terms we use. Multiplexity is one. We don’t think many people use this term. We are pretty sure the “professionals” don’t and it is not in the DSM (the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association) which is used by American and many Canadian psychiatrists.

Although the DSM used to call it MPD then changed it to DID we Webers rarely refer to either of those terms. We also do not like the term “multiplicity” as it sounds too much like “duplicity” which sounds too much like we are all making it up. Which we are not. But multiplexity sounds like “complexity” which makes it sound complicated which it can be.

We don’t often talk in riddles so bear with us.

Now to “we” ... to “us”.

We were born what seems a long time ago. 1953. Our mother turned 40 only a month after our birth. We read somewhere that sometimes a child born to a woman at age 40 or older could turn out to have some kind of mental handicap, such as retardation, or he/she could end up being a genius. Well, we’re pretty sure we are not retarded and maybe it takes some kind of genius to become multiple. It does take a lot of imagination and creativity. And it takes a terrible anguish to need to do it. It also takes an ability to dissociate really well (we’ll tell you more about that in a minute) and, as far as the literature goes and what the “professionals” say, it starts when a child is very young, under about the age of 7 or so.

The anguish and the need. We are talking about trauma and abuse. The initial trauma really was our mother being raped. She was new to the country of Canada. She met some people and at a party or some kind of social gathering, someone slipped something into her drink. It may well have been the date rape drug though we’re not sure if it was around back then. However, we asked her one time what she felt like on the drug and she said she couldn’t really move. She had asked the man, our biological father, to not have sex with her. But he didn’t listen and she said she couldn’t fight him off because of the effects of the drug. That constitutes rape doesn’t it?

When she became pregnant some people told her she should give us up for adoption as she would otherwise become a single mom. She didn’t care. There was no way she would give us up. That’s one good point in her, and our, favour. We were wanted by her. Still, being single meant she could not stay at home and take care of us. So at the age of 6 weeks, she put us into a foster home. We believe, but have no obvious proof, that the first alter was created then because of the trauma of being separated from our mother at such a young age. We used to call this alter Rage, or The Beast of Rage. Eventually we, and he, changed his name to Griffin-CHLD (1). He is a shape shifter – sometimes an animal, often a wolf, and at other times a young man with a beautiful face. We drew a picture of him once.

Trauma probably always creates some kind of dissociation. Some way to block out, delay the awareness of the reality. Shock and a way of coping.

How we define dissociation. Feel free to look it up but this is the way we see it. As human beings, we perceive and form notions about  the world around us through our five senses, our thoughts, our emotions, our actions and our identity. You may come up with other ways too. As life goes on we continuously try to process our experiences. By process we mean we try to bring all of these components into conscious awareness and then try to make sense of them all.

We all want to understand how the world works, what the rules are, what our feelings are about, how we should behave, and who we are in the grand mix of things, how and where we fit in. Although we attempt to bring it all into conscious awareness we can’t. It’s too much. So we filter stuff out, store it away for the future if needed. In the face of trauma, an event or situation that seems unbearable, terrifying and shocking, we may filter out even more. That trauma may get stored away in our brain and may even seem to be totally forgotten. But it is not.

Dissociation is that very act of storing away something that is not bearable, something we cannot cope with or process at the time. We will not seek understanding of the event at that time. Instead we dissociate. That is, we remove it from conscious awareness and store it deeper within. Thus, on some level, the unbearable situation is not happening. At least that’s how it seems.

That is one part of dissociation. The other part is focus. A traumatized child looks for something to focus on. Many abused children probably went far away in their mind when hurt. Maybe a young girl being raped by her father focuses on a spot on the wall until she becomes that spot. That is all she is aware of. Her father is not raping her because she is only a spot on the wall.

If the trauma is repeated often enough, is terrifying enough, the child may journey deeper into her mind, focusing on becoming someone else completely. In some unsophisticated manner, she “decides” she, the little girl, cannot possibly bear this event. So she creates another who can. She creates another self, another personality who then remembers what really happened. In a way, that personality or alter, carries the memory, preserving it for future processing and healing if possible. Thus Griffin-CHLD was born. It may not have been our mother’s fault, putting us in a foster home, but we think the separation from her was traumatic.

However, our mother did not abandon us, at least in the big picture. She came every Sunday to see us in the foster home. She still loved us and we were not totally separated from her. But .... every week she “abandoned” us by leaving us and returning to her home. Over and over. It was not easy for her either. She has told us many times how heartbroken she was when we would want to climb on the bus and go home with her.

The trauma did not stop there though. Again, with no real proof, but only a gut feeling of truth, we believe the foster father sexually and physically abused us. At age 9 months, another self or alter was created. Her original name was Spineless Baby (1) because she/we could not sit up without help. At that age a normal child can sit up. We have a photograph of her at that age propped up by pillows. Maybe there were other factors but neither our mother or the Children’s Aid Society who oversaw our fosterhood, had any explanations for this halt in development. For us, there is only an image of a man in a t-shirt hovering over our crib.

Our mother did tell us that another adult living in the house told her the foster parents weren’t taking good care of us. They tended to be neglectful and not change our diapers often enough. When our mother found this out she immediately requested a new foster home although she did not tell Children’s Aid why. Remarkably, when moved to this new home, we began to catch up in all of our development. A report from the Children’s Aid and tales from our mother confirm that the second foster parents were loving and kind and we grew rapidly.

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There is so much we want to tell you about multiplexity. We will define it our way and the DSM way, tell you more about alters. We want to debunk some of the myths about it for sure, and give you some statistics. We want to tell you that we don’t see it as an illness, not something to triumph over. The abuse is what we have had to deal with and heal from.

And of course, we want to tell you our story, piece by piece.

We will tell you about how we discovered each other, how our names came to be, how many there are of us and why so many. We will introduce many of us ... many, but probably not all. And we want to tell you about our journey, our road to healing, a road that continues even now. It is a road of hope and growth, a wondrous road that twists and turns and we cannot see the end. A road that often scares us but even more often thrills and excites us. Even in the darkest days that road has colours that are rich in intensity, never dull. Even in the midst of our deepest pain we know, WE KNOW, it will get better and better. We are expanding and filling up all the spaces that are us, becoming more and more the “person” we are meant to be. Taking our space in the world.