Little Tim, Big Tim (17 page)

Seventeen fragments/personas are revealed. Eventually, I become aware of each individual persona existing. Particular sensations and/or memories are only held by the persona that was in control of the mind and body at the time the event occurred.

The first switch occurs during a satanic ritual at age five. The pain becomes too much for
LITTLE TIM
.

PETE
(The pain holder) surfaces and will do so consistently when pain is applied to the body.

LITTLE TIM
saw and felt what the men did to his bottom as bad. He couldn’t and didn’t want to be bad, so another persona was created. When I was bad as a child the persona known as, TROY (The BAD boy) suffered the consequences. He carried the anger related to the incident or situation when I was bad, which was determined by my parent’s strict ideals of behaviour.

SHANE
(The shame holder) appeared when other adults labelled Little Tim as sick and bad because of his parent’s behaviour in their community. He is ashamed of himself also.

GARY
(guilt holder) developed when the other personas were so overwhelmed that they couldn’t stop the attacks coming from numerous angles due to disassociating. Gary carried the uncomfortable sensation of not stopping the attacks. His arrival occurred at around the age of ten years.

LITTLE BIG TIM
surfaced as the body grew into puberty and Little Tim went to remain in his sanctuary of many colours. The physical changes to the body reminded him of the bad men that had harmed him. He had not developed with the others and when he surfaced to see these changes he couldn’t absorb the reality.

At age thirteen, Mum started to use us as a surrogate husband. Recently divorced, Little Big Tim became her sex toy. A dilemma developed—Mum’s sexual activity was gentle and soft and prior to this I had suffered rough and violent homosexual acts.

SEXY
took the role of dealing with and appeasing Mum’s inappropriate sexual activity. Because this heterosexual relationship was new, to maintain the only understood experience of sex, being homosexual, I created a female energy or persona to alleviate the confusion—she was known as Lusty.

LUSTY
was suffering a vicious flogging with a jug cord for a minor altercation when

MARK
(stops the marks) suddenly appeared and grabbed the jug cord in full swing to cease the attack on Lusty. After this, Lusty went dormant. Escape from the family home came in the form of joining the Army. Suppression was survival. LITTLE BIG TIM joined the Army with MARK finishing the recruit course.

ADDY
(the addict): due to the religiously staunch ideals belted into me, consuming alcohol and drugs was not acceptable, so ADDY came to carry out those tasks.

Mark didn’t have the right stuff to join the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) so the

SOLDIER
was created. Soldier was quite successful; however at times, when the system failed, one of the others would arise at inappropriate times.

KLUTZ
was created to avoid embarrassment for the system and to take the blame for altercations that arose. SOLDIER functioned better believing that his career was productive and progressing without any repercussions. Within the civilian world the SOLDIER is completely inappropriate to civilian ideals and behaviours, so

MANNY
(the manic one) was created. To balance this event,
DOPEY
(the depressed one) was designed to allow rest.

DIGBY
: present only if life was running smoothly and emotions weren’t needed to be activated.

I have no memory of switches and could only explain this eventuality as having experienced blank spots or blackouts.

WILLIAM
(the writer) came into being and by writing we started the healing process by exposing the facts, as tainted and depraved as they were.

BIG TIM
is the one that desired integration and can now, when he is in control of the body, explain his absence and pass on the knowledge that it’s safe to integrate. He can also express information transferred from the others.

I walk out of the hospital accepting each persona’s beginning, their reason for being and their purpose: seventeen different personas and each of them created out of necessity. When an emotional overload occurred a persona took charge to prevent the whole system being overwhelmed. And when a new situation arose a new persona was created.

The majority of the personas revolve around emotions and sexuality. It is extremely difficult to acknowledge that a female persona by the name of Lusty exists. The lack of belief in her validity stagnated my recovery process, as the majority of personas deny her existence.

The writing starts to flow freely as the years are documented and each persona offers their knowledge as to why and how they existed. Lusty’s truth could no longer be denied; I finally owned the words I had written over and over again, then crumbled and discarded at my feet. I had kept discarding them, grasping the umbilical cord that fed my heterosexuality, frightened that to accept Lusty would rob me of my natural desires.

Lusty’s story describes how she pleasured Mum because Sexy didn’t understand the process of oral sex and would become confused as these inappropriate flashes of time interconnected with other times of being with men. Sexy had to step aside so a female could save the system from imploding. Every time Lusty wrote, her truth never changed, and the writing that flowed was finally believed. When it was accepted, we had sat and cried within our allocated room, grateful that we had been hesitant to walk the halls of the hospital in case of spreading our sickness to those already sick.

I proudly carry hundreds of foolscap pages of knowledge: pages of lost knowledge, knowledge I can accept, knowledge that is real to me, and knowledge that my truth is connecting up. I know the personas, when the personas have been involved and in which situations and incidents. In my bag are two other manuscripts: ‘Switch me off’, the necessary purge to identify events and incidents during my military career and ‘Switch’, the fact/fiction book written to organise the chaos in my mind that was my childhood and the therapy surrounding my desired recovery. The pages under my arm are a monumental start to an autobiography of the recovery journey that I am now excited to share with others. I also hope that others who have suffered like me can find some identification and solace, especially males. I will call this expose of my journey ‘Little Tim, Big Tim’.

A smile crosses my lips as I sit in the outside garden area waiting for my ride, impatient to have the opportunity to assure and confirm with my mental health professionals that I’m starting to understand that the Personas are there. They exist, and I understand their placement in my mind as follows:

Little Tim
immerses himself in the place of many colours, where the Angels can comfort him.

Peter
sits in a comer of my mind, always crossed legged on his bottom, better to sit on the blood than to have it run down his leg. He is afraid that some adult might inquire and be repulsed by the answer.

Troy
hides in his cupboard; a dark but safe space. He has pots and saucepans at his feet, something to bang and clang when angry.

Shane
sits at the big table with his head resting on the flat surface. His arms are folded. Shane’s face is never seen. The perpetual bright stain of shame and embarrassment never fades.

Gary
lives sitting on a dam edge. The location of his first introduction to the madness is the only place of solace for him.

He waits to warn the other children in the hope of alleviating the burden he is destined to carry.

Little Big Tim
sits in a comer and rocks. The rocking is a soothing comfort. The rapid growth and regression has exhausted him. He just moves through space with no true purpose.

Sexy
is very strong and sits by the window between reality and the safe zone. He is the first to jump the void to impress you if you’re female and intimidate you if you’re male. He knows that he has a strong body, however he’s also aware that he can control with charm.

Lusty
stands in the shower and looks at her body wishing for her breasts to grow. Alternatively, she scrubs her skin raw; her sentence of confused duality is the only reality she experiences.

Mark,
created for the purpose of stopping the marks (the attacks), lives in the safe zone doing the opposite—making marks. He has a knife in his hand. He craves for the new strategies, the new techniques, and the new lessons we need to apply to function in the world with a sense of gravity. When these new understandings come, he carves them in the table so they are always accessible. Now the information is not lost between the links of the selves. Everyone can now access the knowledge needed to get better.

Addy
is lost; he lives in the memories of all the couches he sat on getting stoned.

Soldier
alternates; he believes in prior planning and that preparation prevents a piss poor performance. He can be doing push ups in the comer with full kit on and wearing camouflage cream; the next moment he can be back at the unit (Army) at the memorial rock showing reverence to his mates that died, also wondering if he wasted his life.

Klutz
is always on the soldier’s shoulder although Soldier is still unaware of him. Klutz just is.

Manny
paces the room like a tiger and only surfaces when other manic people are around so he doesn’t sense that he is weird. He looks forward to psych ward visits.

Dopey
sleeps, he waits for the others to experience burnout.

Digby
today is completely integrated with Tim. There are no memories left of Digby’s. Digby memories are now Tim’s.

Writer
sits with his a pen on paper, observing.

Big Tim
utilises the pathways that have been created. He encourages integration; he sees this as safe and secure process.

He can decipher trauma and memories and respond to and recognise the difference between them.

The huge steel structure painted grey, criss-crosses the view of the Sydney Harbour. I playfully punch my four-year-old brother James excitedly as I strain to see the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. What a view! The smile on my face is just as big. Dad hasn’t said much about where we are going; just that we ’re to visit some of his friends!

As I begin my autobiography, I shiver with goose bumps, but the memory holds no fear or pain, I am free.

Thank you for sharing the experience of my Recovery Journey. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to document some personas in more detail. To be honest, some personas have not exposed all of the functions and activities that they were involved in. Some personas became fragments and some just held a minor role to assist me in a major crisis in my life. I thank The Higher Power, stronger than I am, that gave a child the resources it needed to survive.

In the past, I would have switches where I didn’t know where I was or what I was. This knowledge confirms for me that the integration process is a positive step and means that I can get back to being able to function in the real world.

I will always honour the fact that the abuse did happen. I will always honour the fact that I will need skills and strategies to get through life, however, by accepting that, it does not debilitate me and it does not force me to be ‘less than.’

So, while I’ve both enjoyed and suffered writing this recovery autobiography of my journey, I hope it helps someone else out there. This is really its divine purpose—to assist others to heal in conjunction with the help of mental health professionals.

I would never deny the importance and value of the help of professionals, the twelve-step meetings and the peer support groups.

Also, I believe that those who need help must get as much as they can from the appropriate institutions. But if something is still lacking in the wisdom they seek, I would encourage them to keep moving forward in pursuit of the answers they need.

The answer I needed was that I had to forgive myself. I find the concept of forgiving others irrelevant, considering that most of these people who abuse children—paedophiles and such, are abusing not only one child but many. In my opinion, the only way forgiveness can work for one individual abuser is by all victims who have suffered at their hands to forgive collectively, otherwise it’s really irrelevant to forgive.

Strange as it may sound, I truly believe that if you can forgive yourself—for the pain you put yourself through, for the lifestyle you’ve lived, for your drug and alcohol addiction, for the guilt and shame you carry, for all the ills and woes that you decided to place upon yourself—then you can obtain your freedom You must also forgive others around you for not listening to what went on around them; if you are willing to come to that stage and are able to forgive all of that, you become a complete person. For me, this is where integration becomes a reality. This means I can forgive myself.

I forgive myself and I’m free.

THE END

1. Tim interviews Dr Jan Ewing

2. Dr Jan speaks with Little Tim

3. Dr Jan speaks with Troy

Tim:
I want to interview you about the last three years.

Dr Jan:
Ok

Tim:
Okay I’m aware that with DID and leaving here at times I would have no memory of what was said between us or what work was given. However when I did leave here there was always something that sort of triggered within me which was a good trigger for me to work on what was appropriate. I suppose the best way to do this for the benefit of the recovery autobiography is we met three years ago, what did you think when we started.

Dr Jan:
You are going to test my memory now.

Tim:
That he’s a mess

Dr Jan:
You had childhood issues that you wanted to focus on. They (PTSD Course) were sending you to me. That was something that you identified as something you wanted to work on.

Tim:
So I actually spoke to someone about that because I have no memory of that. I only believed that I was coming here for the understanding of the combat PTSD in reference to the death of the lads and not really being able to resolve or understand how to grieve that process.

Dr Jan:
In the group program they commented that you had difficulty (in the individual sessions within the group program) that you had difficulty focusing on any one issue for too long, that you believed that many of the current problems were linked to your childhood background. And you had to revisit that to deal with that. They thought that was an issue—that until you had resolved that you couldn’t really focus on any of the other PTSD stuff and I said that was fine. I would be happy to explore that with you.

Tim:
And I thought I was a good student.

Dr Jan:
Oh well (Tim and Dr Jan laugh) It doesn’t mean you weren’t a good student. It means that actually you were a good student and that you identified what was the next thing that you had to do. You knew what was going on for you.

Tim:
I have no memory of asking for help regarding the childhood stuff.

Dr Jan:
This report is interesting from the PTSD course; you had reported history of severe childhood sexual and emotional abuse instigated by both parents. In order to cope with this situation Tim described himself as acting like a chameleon, so that he could remain in the background without being noticed.

And you described being isolated with limited communication between your siblings. So you identified that. I think the use of chameleon is very interesting. Chameleons change in order to blend in with their environment.

It’s an interesting description to be a chameleon isn’t it? That with each situation with its different stress levels; you could turn into a chameleon; that you could actually be a different person in each situation which would enhance your safety. So even back then you were using a description that sits very nicely with what was going on.

Tim:
Okay, in hindsight you and I have worked from a level where we understand that the DID system was extremely functional in getting me to levels like employment with the SAS. The fact that it actually probably imploded at the end of my time there and the reason I conducted the safety breaches within training. Did you feel that we worked on that specific area to get to the point where we are now or did we find that specific area of the trauma within me, for example, the felt sensation of abandonment on the beach?

Dr Jan:
I think we got to that point pretty early. We started working on that stuff for the reasons you were talking about. I actually always thought they were more of a door into where we really needed to go. But we needed to work on those to get some sort of an understanding because you always ended up coming back to the childhood issues that were being triggered by the adult PTSD things.

Within our sessions, you would end up back in the Blue Mountains and back in that whole sort of police raid and all that sort of stuff and that took you back to those original traumas. I mean that was almost like creating a re-enactment of the whole violation and unjust invasion of boundaries in an adult sense. It was almost like going back there, life’s experiences offered a reason to recognise that you where treated unjustly. I always felt that we had to explore more.

I actually thought that with the events like being left on the beach, there had to be some validation on my part; that you needed me to know that that had happened, that it was real and that I was going to be on board with that that, of course, that would traumatise you but I’d never was all that fussed about it. Because I really felt that those events, I have no idea what happened in those events and I only take your story for it, as I guess with everything.

I always did have some sense that these were surface manifestations of something else that was going on for you, that what was happening for you at that point was just coloured.

So, than we would never have a clear understanding of what that was, until we went back to the childhood stuff.

So we dealt with it fairly quickly in terms of validation and giving some understanding about what that would do to somebody having that experience. But then we needed to go very quickly to why you think that experience affected you the way it affected you, in particular at that point. Then we started to move-into childhood experiences.

Tim:
And when you say then we started to move into—was there a period of time of between you and I, I mean was there times and were there places and events that you know that you have a memory of that I don’t have a memory of?

Dr Jan:
Well it’s hard for me to know what you’ve got a memory of. I was never surprised when you would come back in sessions and say that you did not remember much of the last session and I accept that that may well have been the fact. Particularly if I had been interacting with another alter( persona) during the session, during the next session, you, the host Tim, would come out and would say that you don’t remember much of what went on or only have a very short vague memory of what went on. Then I would often tell you; sometimes I would only give you a general idea if I thought that was what you needed to know.

So I’m sure that there were sessions that I was having with you where the host Tim would only have a very vague memory of having been here and that was about all. One of the signs of integration has been that you experience that less and less and you have experienced that outcome on fewer occasions.

Tim:
Yeah well is it a complex situation; is it the fact that there is a duality there in the majority of cases?

Dr Jan:
In the majority of cases that I see I would say that it’s complex, but it’s very common also that there have been difficult childhoods unresolved childhood issues which were resolved just by going tough. That toughness reached its limit and then there was a breakdown of not only what was going on, but also of all that went before. Then having to go back to all of the earlier stuff and yes that duality is not uncommon.

The best soldiers, once that real toughness has reached its limit, have got a lot of unresolved issues from childhood, which is what made them a good soldier in the first place. They learnt to dissociate early, they learnt to be tough, they learnt not to feel things and they learned to just push through, very early.

I encounter large numbers of veterans with PTSD who have you know clearly got huge amounts of character and strength, but have got histories of childhood abuse of one sort or another and that has made that system, which is fragile within in them, to reach it’s limit. And so recovery is more complicated.

Those that don’t, those that just have had a pretty well adjusted background, have had one or two overwhelming situations that have created PTSD and their only trauma have been adult age trauma, recovery is a fairly straight forward treatment process. You deal with the trauma, they recover and see you later, and six months down the track we’re done. The others I have seen for longer inevitably have got childhood issues.

Tim:
Okay prior to meeting you and as
I
met Larry and worked out that I needed to get help, you know the biggest numb off component in my life was drugs and alcohol. Do you think I could of achieved the level of recovery we’ve achieved today using drugs and alcohol?

Dr Jan:
Absolutely not. I think that if you had continued to use drugs and alcohol you might not even be alive today. And I certainly don’t think, I think drugs and alcohol can keep you away from psychological pain. They can’t in any way allow you to process and do the recovery work that you need to do. I think that drugs and alcohol are self-medication to try to dull pain, but they don’t do healing.

Tim:
So talking of healing, when do you think we really started to escalate in our understanding that we were going to be able to work together and heal with each other? Is there a moment in time?

Dr Jan:
Well to begin with, I remember feeling we needed that before we were going to do the work we were going to do. We really needed to build a strong therapeutic alignment. I was going to give you plenty of time to do that and I have been sure to be very open with you and to make sure that you knew that you could trust me.

If you asked me a question I would answer it. But I think the most pivotal session was one of those early sessions, one of the EMDR sessions. I can’t remember if it was the first time, but it was one of the early times when we did the EMDR session. You were having a memory of when you were about nine and then we went back to some earlier memories, but we did some work which was to show you that they were memories.

I was suggesting to you as you were starting to reexperience them that you could prove to yourself that these were memories by changing something and you were able to do that. You were able to take a baseball bat to one of them (paedophiles) and change the perceived reality and that, I think, was a watershed session for both of us. It was the session where you got relief; you were resigned to the fact that this was a memory. But not only that they were memories, but if they came up, you had some sort of strategy that you could use to show yourself, again, that it was a memory.

You could actually use that tool to give yourself some psychological distance from them again, so that you wouldn’t just get thrown into them. You know, if you got triggered somewhere you wouldn’t just be frozen and be re-experiencing all of the fear as if it was about to happen again, you could actually use that tool. And you started using. Whenever you found something, you’ve always grabbed hold of it and gone out and used it—to your great credit.

And you started using that very quickly after that and instead of having to come back in and do more work on memories, you actually just went away and started doing that on your own. Brought all the memories up and started changing them and doing the work It’s always surprised me that we’ve often only had to do one or two sessions on something that I expect to do fifteen sessions on. But you get the tool and you go away and by the time you’ve come back in, all the things I think we’re going to do next, you’ve actually been doing in between sessions.

So that, I think, was the first time that you got a real sense that I was going to be able to give you something, a good change and a sense that you could actually do the change yourself out there and get some real insight.

And it also taught me that this was going to be the process.

I think I’ve always followed along behind (laughing) you know, you’ll come back in and tell me where you are up to now. Because you’re going to go away always have done the amount of work I had just given you. I would say here’s a tool and off you go and start using it.

So I have to then be prepared for where you are going to be when you come back in again, because what you do in between sessions is going to be a whole lot of work that might normally only happen in here. Other people maybe too anxious to do and would only do it in here. So I decided to follow your lead because when you come back in I have to discover where we are, from the work you’ve done in between. And then you usually tell me where we need to go next and we go to the next one, so it’s been very much lead from behind.

Tim:
So when we walk in here and we go very confidently looking you in the eye and say that we don’t have DID where do you go from there?

Dr Jan:
(big laugh) Aahh, when you very confidently tell me that you don’t have DID we’ll talk about what that means to you and…

Tim:
So we already do that.

Dr Jan:
That’s right and we always talk about it and we always come to an understanding that we both agree.

Tim:
Well one of us agreed anyway.

Dr Jan:
Well yes we come to some understanding about what does that mean. What does it mean not to have DID

Tim:
Well DID to me means that the escalation of productive therapy leads to DDNOS (Dissociative Disorder Non Otherwise Specified) escalating to another level which is known as something else. DID is a part of a process that is only part of my recovery journey.

The pivotal moment for me was hearing the soft young voice of Little Tim, accepting that a persona age five existed within me. And feeling you’re working very hard to remain in your professional role and resisting from comforting the frightened persona that owns the five year old voice. That was a revealing moment and at that point I walked out of therapy believing that there was a possibility, a big chance that I have suffered with DID since I was a child. There was a BIG Tim and now a Little Tim.