I am an alter. You and I share the same body. For your sake I was split off from you. Because you couldn’t handle the horror, I was left with the anguish you could not bear. I have allowed you to get on with life while I’ve been left behind with all the pain and no one to help me. Won’t you help me? Won’t somebody care? You have forgotten the horror, but everyday I re-live it. It is all I know. You have grown up and discovered answers I desperately need to end my pain. Won’t you share your answers with me?

I am a person. A real person. I live in you. I have feelings. I have tears, pains, joys, needs and desires just like anybody else.

I am me. I want to be me and loved for being me. Why is that hard to understand? Isn’t that what every human wants? I need you to teach me what you have learned since I was first left behind. I get so very lonely. I need friends. I need you to lead me to the God who can heal me.

You mean everything to me. It breaks my heart when you reject me. I know you want to forget everything that happened, but how can you, when part of you is still reeling in it? When my pain is healed, you will find peace like you have never known. I am dying in pain. How can you not care?

I’m as much a part of you as your arm. Just as your arm can help you and can feel pain, so can I, but far beyond any limb, I have a mind. I am conscious and crave your love and understanding, and I hurt ever so deeply when you ignore me.

If your arm broke you’d care. You’d understand that pain and rush to look after it. How come this doesn’t apply to me?

I am a little child trapped in your mind, waiting for you to stop suppressing me so that I can be freed from the torment of solitary confinement; waiting for you to acknowledge me so I can heal. Why do you hate me and suppress me, locking me away like a caged animal instead of treating me with the kindness that every child deserves?

I took the pain so that you could live as normally as possible. But the pain stays with me like a crippling, crushing weight strapped to my back and I can’t carry it much longer.

You hold the love and friendship and understanding I desperately need to be freed from my pain.

Why can’t you love me? I took the horror for you. I thought you’d love me for this. I am your friend. I am so confused and trapped with the pain. And when you become aware that I feel that pain for you – pain I could be freed from if only you would help – you shove me away as if somehow I am bad? I don’t understand.

Please love me and let me have some healing too. I want to be your friend.

Postscript

The little alter who wrote the above (slightly touched up by me) calls her host, “Mama” and, after agonizingly long years of neglect, now receives from her host a mother’s unconditional love that she was cruelly denied as a child. She writes, “When Mama tells me she loves me it makes me giggle with delight.”

This alter has a much older sister-alter, formed when the host was in her early twenties. She acts tough and is very capable. One day, when this adult alter was deeply distressed, her host asked what she could do to help. She expected a long and complicated list but to her surprise the alter replied that what she most wanted was for the host to mother her, thus meeting her deep unmet craving for her mother’s approval. The host hugged this adult alter and told her she was proud of her. From then on they bonded in a special way and the host treated her as her dearly loved daughter. The healing benefits from this love have flowed to every part of the person and have kept multiplying, week after week after week.

For more, see To Protector Alters from a Protector Alter

Related Pages

For much more insight and help, see:
Christian Resources: Index of Help for Dissociative Identity Disorder

Personalized support
Grantley Morris: healing@net-burst.net

© 2009, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: the text is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged and it is not used in a webpage. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.net  Freely you have received, freely give. For use outside these limits, consult the author.