Jay Young of Astraea’s web made some valid points about trauma/buse disclosure in “real” multiplicity in her comment on Brenda’s post. I’m not as witty as Brenda is, but here is a list of rules for abuse disclosure if you want to be a proper multiple.
- Multiplicity is always caused by severe, prolonged, horrific abuse, usually sexual abuse and in most proper cases satanic ritual abuse. I know the Dutch association for people with dissociative disorders had in their newsletter an advice column in which the columnist said other trauma can cause DID too, but this is not apparent anywhere else.
- For this reason, you must on occasion drop words like “SRA”, “programming”, etc. in conversations about your DID.
- In the offline meetings of the Dutch DID support group at least, you cannot go into detail about your trauma, or you can if it was not bad anyway. I was actually pretty much expected to disclose some details of stuff I consider traumatic.
- You must have particular triggers, such as SRA holidays or certain colors. You cannot say why these trigger you, but it’s no problem that you dissociate when such a trigger comes up. Other people constantly doubting your sincerity obviously can’t be a trigger.
- Validating others’ SRA meories is of utmost importance, but if you’ve gone through more mundane trauma, no-one is required to validate you.
Katinka
