4. How many personalities

"Portal to Kereth"

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.

Well it’s getting harder to sleep, to get enough sleep. All because of us doing this blog. When we woke up this morning our whole body was vibrating with excitement. Many of us talking away, ideas about things we could put in our blog. Othel (1) says to us “This is what hypomania is like”. Oh. Let us explain. Some of you may know about bipolar disorder, which used to be called “manic depressive disorder”. A person who has Bipolar Disorder I may experience highs called “manic” episodes. They feel really, REALLY good, expansive, full of ideas, tons of thoughts and fast too. They may also do things that lack good judgement and later feel awful about it. They may also experience real lows – depression.

We have never been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder but we are pretty sure we have experienced “hypomanic” episodes, a milder form of mania, and what would be diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder II. When we learned about hypomania we said “We have had that”. And Othel said “Yah, I have had that.” Oh. He says if we did get the diagnosis it would belong to him. Okay, we’ll buy that. The symptoms Othel has had – don’t need as much sleep, extremely productive, wired, speedy, full of ideas, very creative, lots of thoughts flying by like a high-speed train. Fortunately we are multiple and can tone down those symptoms most of the time. We have alters Inside who can help us stay grounded and calm. There have been a few times when that hypomania takes over but only a few times.

But yes, we woke up feeling high and very anxious to get going on today’s posting. Didn’t have time to read our novel or meditate. We’ll do it later (we hope). And we hope we don’t crash at some point today. It’s not pretty. Anyway on to our post.

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About trauma

First, a word about “trauma”. What is trauma? It’s when a person feels psychologically overwhelmed and she or he can’t physically escape from the situation. She may feel her very life is threatened and she may also feel completely helpless and powerless at the time. If the trauma is severe enough and prolonged enough, if it starts when the child is quite young (less than about 7 years old) he may become multiple. Most often the trauma is in the form of some kind of abuse – sexual, physical, emotional/psychological, verbal – or could be the result of neglect or abandonment.

Awareness of each other

We want to take you back to our first post and the very first thing we said. We wrote that “most of us didn’t know about most of us.” What a bizarre and confusing statement. Well, alters (or personalities) have different ways of knowing about other alters inside. Let’s say there are three alters – A, B and C – existing within a person who is multiple.

-   Alter A knows about the existence of B and C, so he knows he is multiple and knows all of the alters who exist inside the person.

-  Alter B knows that C exists but doesn’t know A does. So B knows she is multiple but doesn’t know all of the alters inside.

-  C ... poor C. She has no idea that she is multiple and doesn’t know that there are others inside. (That would be me-Shell and some others)

So, most of us, in this system called Caer, knew about some of the other alters inside us. A few of us didn’t know we were sharing this body with anyone else. And a very few knew of the existence of all of us.

We could use the same model for who is aware of what traumas happened to the child. Some alters may know a lot of the trauma that happened, some may know of some instances and some may not know of any trauma at all. Some alters are created strictly to help the person function, while other alters are created strictly to handle the trauma.

God we hope all of that’s clear. But if it isn’t please do ask. We welcome everyone’s questions and will try to answer them as best we can.

How many of us

Okay, we know you are dying to ask the question, the one we are most often asked, the one thing that almost everyone wants to know  -- how many alters do you have? We have heard many people gasp when we answer and it makes us cringe. We feel almost embarrassed about it and want to apologize for having so many. Why is that? Why is it such a big deal how many we have? Maybe that’s a question for you readers to answer although we have a feeling the media plays a big part in this. You have only to look on the cover of many books and see – she had 90 personalities inside her!!!!! We are guessing that you are trying to understand how anyone with a lot of personalities can manage it all. One thing to remember, human beings can handle a lot. We are able to adapt to the most horrific of circumstances. Multiples are no different. We find a way to cope, to survive, and even to thrive. It’s what the human mind is capable of. And that is what is truly amazing.

Having said all of that let us explain why one person may create only 3 personalities and another create 1400. (Yes, we’ve heard of that somewhere). The number of personalities a person creates depends on various factors such as the severity and type of trauma and/or abuse. First we want to emphasize that all abuse is severe and traumatic, whether it happens one time or many, whether it is one instance of sexual fondling or many times of rape, it still causes great harm to the child and affects the person for the rest of his or her life. However, some traumas can be more extreme and cause the child to create more alters to handle them. The child may witness other children or even animals being abused and harmed. Or, the child may be forced to hurt others leaving him or her with a lifelong sense of guilt and self-blame that is tremendously difficult to get past. If the child is hurt by more than one person it may cause more serious damage and if the abuse continues for many years that child will suffer a lot. Even if the type of trauma varies – say sometimes sexual abuse, sometimes neglect, sometimes verbal abuse – it may cause the person to create alters who can deal with each type of trauma, compartmentalizing each situation, keeping them separate. Thus the child does not get too overwhelmed, to the point of not being able to function, or become psychotic and/or extremely suicidal.  

But sometimes the child may experience very few abusive situations and yet create many alters to deal with them. This is then a matter of preference, of how that child wants to break things down in order to survive. For example, we created 13 alters called The Blue Ones (6st). Their task was simple. They carried all of the emotions for some other alters. Their name refers to tears. We could have created just one alter to carry all the emotions but our preference was to make those tears smaller, believing that it would be easier to handle. We broke many events down in that way. Small pieces, only bits of memory for any one alter to carry. This is the way we survived and compartmentalized all that happened to us.

So now the answer – last count we were 183. That number is partly due to the severity of the abuse, and to the length of time we were abused, from less than one years old up until we were 17, and by many people. This is how we took all of those memories and broke them into tiny pieces, to be put away in tiny boxes, in a place we call The Storehouse. Then, during our years of therapy and healing, we broke open those boxes, one by one, and began to tell our story. We processed much of what happened to us and came to understand who we were.

183 is a lot to manage but we don’t have to manage each individual. We have made it easier by forming into groups although some alters in our system did not belong to any group. Those who have been in groups usually knew about others in their group at least and sometimes even knew about some or all of the other groups. Often those of us who were not in a group did not know about the others, did not know we were multiple. Now we all do.

Most of us are people, human. Some of us are not. We mentioned in our first post “1. Yes We Are...” that Griffin-CHLD (1)was the first alter to be created and that sometimes he is an animal and sometimes he is simply human. A shape-shifter. Serena (5) is also a shape-shifter – sometimes a lion, sometimes a woman. Caere (6st) (pronounced “Carrie”) is a seahorse and human. We mentioned above The Blue Ones (6st) who are tears. We have a collection of 8 insects – moths, butterflies, caterpillars.... A dog – DoG-GoD (5), birds – The Two Colettes (4), Raven (3) and Phoenix (8). The Codes (6mf) were originally objects, cubes, until we did therapy with them and The Blue Ones helped them become human.

The original groups were:

• The Others (1)
• The More Others (2)
• The Thirteen (3)
• Gaetway (4)
• Una's Brood (4)
• Archimedes’ Net (4) 
• Serena et al (5)
• The Babies (5),
• Mainframe (6mf)
• The Stoene (6st)
• The Red (6r)
• The Resistance (7), and
• Independents (8)

We still recognize the groups but over the past number of years we have created new ones based on interests and functions. We have a few alters who are now The Elders. They know the most about us and can handle it. The Weavers is the biggest group. All of us alters who are 15 years old and up are part of this group. This is where our important decisions are made – who our friends are, what work we do, where we live. Those under 15 are part of The Juidith Warriors. We‘ll tell you more about them later. We have Inner Self Helpers (ISH) that we will also talk about later. For our writing we have The Writers’ Block, for drawing and painting Art-Works. We have dancers – Move It, and singers – The Blue Notes, The IQs love studying, learning and theorizing about life. The Rainbow Gang are in charge of hope.

4 periods of time

One way that we look at our life is by 4 periods of time – during the abuse when most of us were created, after the abuse ended but all the memories were repressed and knowledge of each other was limited, then what we call “Emergence”. This was when we began to discover each other and we also began opening all those boxes, all those memories. In some ways this phase was more difficult than the abuse itself, because we were feeling all of those emotions we could not allow ourself to feel when we were a child. It was a tremendously painful time and we would not wish it on anyone. However, we would not be where we are now if we had not taken that road. It was a journey worth taking for this period of time is the best one so far. Make no mistake, we are not “cured”. In fact we don’t look at being multiple in black or white terms. It is not something we were and now something we are not. And our journey of healing does not have an end. As they say in Lord of the Rings “the road goes ever on and on”. This is a lifelong journey. All elements of our life are interwoven into a tapestry that is us.

Empath (1)

At this time, we have a very special alter named Empath. Over the years we have come to recognize that she is our “highest self”, what we ultimately aspire to be. We want to learn how to have compassion for others as well as for ourselves. We have been going to a support group for 1½ years and there we are able to practice that compassion. We could not do this if it hadn’t been for all of our years of therapy and healing, getting what we needed. (We had a psychiatrist for 17 years who helped us with this immensely and taught us a wonderful way of being in the world. She was incredibly non-judgmental and showed the utmost empathy and compassion for us. Unfortunately she closed her practice in 2007). We believe that when you get your own needs met it is a lot easier to be there for others. When you are in need of healing, you must turn inward, pay attention to what hurts, and work on it. It is very difficult then to really be there for other people. And that’s okay.

But the support group has been wonderful therapy for us. There we are all the same, all struggling with issues in our lives, most of us in a lot of pain. For us Webers though, this does not depress us or bring us down. It fills us up with the human story and Empath lifts us up and carries us through this. This is another journey, another path we walk, and we get to walk it with all of these incredible people. We have so much room inside of us now for our heart to open and feel for all of us. And what a privilege that is. There doesn’t seem to be any greater high than caring about others, connecting with others.

And not to forget - we also have the most wonderful friends, who accept us as we are. We feel so very grateful.

An apology

We often refer to people with multiple personality as multiple. Often we have heard people say you are not your disease. First of all, us Webers are not sure multiplexity is an illness. It is a coping mechanism more than anything and we think the abusers are the ones who are really ill. But even if multiplexity is an illness, it’s different than other mental illnesses. It is about who you are, it is about identity. I am multiple. It is my way of being in the world.

However, other people with the condition may not see it that way and you have our apology if this has offended you.

Talk to you later guys. Thanks for listening.