8. EMERGENCE: Introducing us

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.

We have had some down time for the past 2 days. Sick with a cold. But that’s okay. Got lots of reading done and that makes Ariel (1) very happy indeed. She is our reader, the one who chooses the books we read most of the time. She’s also very picky about what she wants to read and will “trash” a book very quickly if it isn’t exactly the right mood. The rest of us go right along with it. Most of the time.

Today we are going to begin introducing ourselves to you. If you are not into this, don’t like long lists of names or things of that nature you can skip this part. We won’t be too offended.  In the beginning it was very hard for me-Shell (1, 2) (and probably other alters) to accept all these new names and faces. I sat on a razor edge of belief and disbelief often. But our system of alters has worked very hard and we have grown to care about each other, to accept each other, to know each other. We have learned how to negotiate for the things each of us wants, and how to compromise with one another. We have also learned how to love each other. Sounds bizarre? Well, maybe it is a little. But it is critical for a multiple in order to heal. We needed to accept and care for each other if we were going to have any possible psychological growth and to help us through the remembering of the abuse. We had to work together. Absolutely.

So we are going to go through each group that was created and roughly in order of who emerged first. If you want to know more about one of us, please ask and we will try to answer. Sometimes we have lots of info on an alter and other times very little. We still don’t know a lot about some of us and that’s most likely for protection. It’s possible we will never know or possible we will find out more someday when we feel more ready.

EMERGENCE

December 7, 1990 was the day we acknowledged there was more than one of us residing in this body. We call that day “Emergence”. We were in the psych ward at UBC hospital, having admitted ourself two days previous. I, Shell, was not present the day we went to the UBC emergency (hey, how appropriate a word that is). By “present” I mean I was not consciously aware of going to the hospital. It was as if I was sleeping. Of course there were many of us not consciously aware that day. I (Shell) recall “waking up” later that first day to find myself in the ER and phoned my boss to tell her I wasn’t coming in to work.

UBC admitted us and put us in our own room. In a sense, all hell broke loose within. Absolute chaos.

But let’s back up for a minute and fill you in on some of what had been happening that year. We were a student at BCIT and in January we were into our fourth and final term in Personnel Management. Almost done. Only months to go. But alas, that was definitely not to be. There were things pressing down on us with great force and we were about to explode. Back in January 1989 our son, Graham’s, uncle (Graham’s dad’s brother) committed suicide. We’ll call him Steve and he was like a brother to us as well. We had been friends since 1972, when we first moved out to Vancouver with our boyfriend David (Graham’s dad). While it wasn’t a surprise, he had tried a number of times before, it was very much a shock and extremely painful to lose him. Two months later a man we knew a little died suddenly of an aneurysm (blood clot in the brain). Funny thing was he reminded us of Steve. We didn’t know this man very well but enough for it to also be a shock. A few months later a woman we sort of knew died in a car crash. Again ... a shock.

July 1989 we were driving to work one day with the radio on and heard the news that a bus in the Middle East had been attacked and one Canadian woman on it was killed. We knew the name. She had worked across the hall from where we were working and had come into our office many times. This time we burst into tears, while driving. It was another shock of course, but I think it was more that it felt like all these people were dying. This was death #4 in a period of 6 months and it was really beginning to get to us. Yet, it didn’t really sink it until 1990.

There was one more death that year but it was one that we accepted more readily. Our grandmother. She was 96 years old. The amazing thing was that she had been very much on our mind that August just before her death. We had started writing a story and realized she had become an internal voice and critic of our writing. We had a book about writing and it had an exercise to help you deal with your critics. So we wrote to our grandmother and for her – a therapeutic dialogue. So when we heard she had died it was a different sort of shock. Here we had been thinking a lot about her and then she died. Talk about coincidence and synchronicity.

Five deaths in one year had to have some kind of impact and it did. But not until late in 1989 and on into 1990, our fourth term at BCIT. It was then we started unravelling and falling apart.

onto 9. EMERGENCE: Crisis