When did you first know you were Multiple?

Q. When did you first know you were Multiple? - Marcy

A: I was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder in the summer of 1996. I was already aware that I was Multiple before the official diagnosis got applied, but there was still something oddly heavy, scary, and final about having a Psychologist and a Psychiatrist confirm it (when I hadn't told them my suspicion).

It's hard to answer the question of "When did you first know you were Multiple?" Who, exactly, are you asking? Because some of us inside knew almost two decades before others inside found out! But there is also the complication that when you are a young kid, you think you are normal because you don't have a lot of reference points yet to compare with. And that's especially true when talking about trying to figure out if your brain works the same as everyone else.

As far as we can tell, I became a We at age two or three. "How do you know your memory is from that age? That's an awfully long time ago!" yes, it is an awfully long time ago for most of us. But some of my parts are frozen in time, and that's not far away from their perspective. The way I'm able to age most of my memories though is because my family moved every year or two, so I can figure out the years based on what house I'm remembering. I've also verified details and memories of houses and ages with my mom, and the records she has of our moves.

Anyway, we continued to make alters to help deal with new challenges (moving, school, church, friends, continued abuse, different abusers, etc.) until the abuse stopped at age 14. I, Selah, didn't meet the others until college. I was created to go to school, and protected from knowing about the others so I wouldn't also have to know about the abuse. When they began to make themselves known to me, I felt like my world was being ripped apart, like I was being shredded apart. I began to question everything, and I trusted nothing, especially not them.

I knew we were different from our peers early in life, before school even started. Mostly because I understood my father's threats that the abuse was a secret that had to be protected at all costs. I withdrew from my peers because it was the easiest way to protect the secret. We knew being Multiple was something we had to hide by the time we were 6 or 7. Which is why Selah got created, because we needed a unified appearance and memory for learning for school.

Things began to unravel in college. That's when it became painfully obvious to me, Selah, that there were others sharing my life and my body. And they started to really show me the holes in my memory and daily life. I remember my mom came to visit me in college and a lady came up to me and asked how I was doing and what I was up to, normal chit chat for someone who knows you. But I didn't know her. She asked who I was with and I had to figure out how to introduce my mother to a stranger who seemed to know me. I was mortified. My mom caught on and helped introduce herself, then later asked me what happened. I told her the truth: I had no idea who that lady was. I speculated that she had me mistaken for someone else.

Later that night I got shown of memory that I had been in a writing class with that woman earlier that year. But I didn't remember the class either! It was a month long semester in January where my college offered unusual classes, and the more I tried to think about it the more I realized I didn't remember January! I asked my best friend about the class casually, and she had taken the class with me. Oh vey.

Another stark slap in the face was when I found myself in second year college Spanish one day and realized I didn't understand a single word! The alter who had learned Spanish had decided that she was no longer going to be in class. I was confused, ashamed, and mostly pissed. How was I suppose to pass a class in a foreign language that I never learned?!

Good times ;-)

So, we began to unravel and start tearing down the internal amnesia in 1993, with Selah really finding out starting in 1994. Recovery really started for us because we were finally away from the father for the first time. It was finally safe to feel and remember again. But it also became necessary to get Selah to know because we knew we had to confront the father before he had the chance to abuse grandkids that were hitting the "right ages" for them to be at risk of sexual abuse. We did confront him in 1995, which really opened the floodgates for even more alters and memories to come out of the closet for all insiders to face. That's when recovery became a real life or death deal, one we weren't always sure we'd survive. But we knew that to avoid recovery was an absolute one-way ticket to suicide.