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Cure for Self-Hate   Help If You Hate Yourself Healing and Compassionate Understanding This webpage is of immense significance to the very many of us who sometimes hate ourselves, despise ourselves or suffer from low self-esteem. So revolutionary are the answers to self-hate, that no matter how they are presented they can initially seem off-the-planet or not personally applicable to your situation until you have fully absorbed the entire webpage. So despite any initial qualms, I urge you to keep reading. It can change your life. Self-loathing and/or self-injury is an exceedingly complex issue because it is an expression of the depths of one’s humanity. It is a manifestation of a need that totally eclipses animals or machines – the need to comprehend complex concepts and emotions and to communicate them with an equally intelligent being. It reveals that you, like all humans, are a breathtakingly intricate, sophisticated and noble being with lofty ideals and a deep yearning to understand and be understood. As beyond belief as it initially seems, we will discover that our dilemma is not that we are alone and not understood but simply that we have not grasped how totally known, valued and accepted we really are. In some cases, self-hate originates not from deliberate childhood abuse but from significant people in one’s life inadvertently giving the dangerously wrong impression that you are not quite good enough to be loved. Children’s need for parental love and approval almost rivals their need for oxygen, but even quite good parents can be rather miserly in giving it. It might simply be that the parent – especially common in fathers – is emotionally reserved and has no idea how much he or she is leaving the child with a gnawing ache for parental affection and/or approval. The result is what can feel like an unfillable hole in the child that refuses to diminish even after the child has matured into a capable adult. People suffering this way usually downgrade the significance of having felt love-deprived as a child. They see it as minor relative to obvious child abuse but just as malnutrition in childhood can have serious, long-term implications, so can feeling love-starved. An unmet craving for parental approval can not only last a lifetime, it can transmute into a gut-wrenching feeling of inadequacy that produces an endless striving to be “good enough,” or even result in self-loathing. Even highly successful people can stagger through life little moved by world acclaim, but desperately pining for their parents’ approval, and never feeling they can get it. Sometimes an eating disorder, or some other unusual behavior is a manifestation of this desperate attempt to be “good enough.” The critical factor is not how loved, desirable, successful or capable we really are, but how we  suppose  we measure up. This, in turn, is usually strongly influenced by the self-image we gained during our most impressionable years – our childhood. In cases of blatant abuse, even more devastating than the inflicted physical pain is the long-lasting psychological wounding. Abusers typically try to ease their own conscience for their shameful acts of cruelty by either forcefully declaring or implying that their victims are useless, or worse. The torment they inflict is so emotionally shattering that it leaves an indelible impression on their victims. Putdowns can have serious implications, however, regardless of whether they come in the form of violent abuse, solely verbal, or only be the rationing of parental love, and regardless of whether the child is correct or mistaken in interpreting it as a putdown. What makes suffering perceived putdowns during one’s childhood particularly devastating is that not only did they occur during one’s impressionable years, those treating the child this way were usually older (and therefore smarter), and hence perceived by the child as reliable, authoritative sources of information. Moreover, abusers often keep their bad behavior behind closed doors and are respected by the community or thought by other family members incapable of doing wrong. Tragically, though not surprisingly, these factors combine to leave survivors with the mistaken but powerful impression that they must have deserved the verbal or physical abuse or the withholding of love that they received. It might have been so much part of your life that you have accepted it as normal but if you engage in self-hate you have almost certainly been repeatedly and horrifically slandered – probably beginning in your most impressionable years. You might have been told by someone whose opinion you respect that you are hopeless, a loser, evil, stupid, or slut or some other putdown. The inevitable consequence is that, like being subjected to years of the cruelest brainwashing, you have come to accept those lies as truth. It has so distorted your perception of yourself that you have most likely deepened the insidious brainwashing still further by repeating the lies to yourself for years. Like becoming an addict through being forcibly given drugs as a child, repeatedly putting yourself down and telling yourself negative things has become an addiction. Just as knowing that heroin is destroying you does not make it easy to stop, so it is with this habit. Anyone, no matter how smart, who has suffered as you have, would end up this way. A genius finds it just as hard to break an addiction as someone less intelligent. The delusion now feels more real to you than the truth. Having been subjected to this brainwashing process, makes it a long and difficult process to break out of that highly convincing deception and to begin consistently seeing things as they really are. You can do it but it will take determined effort over a long time. Fear of Hope Dashed hopes – especially when repeated a few times – can be so agonizing that it is not unusual to consciously or unconsciously decide that rather than risk another bitter episode it is better to crush all hope. Usually, the easiest way to do this is by continually thinking lowly of ourselves. Sometimes we can intensify this to loathing or despising ourselves. I might, for example, think it better to think I’ll never achieve anything than risk expecting to achieve and then suffer the pain of dashed hope. Some people do such things as overeat, dress drably or neglect personal hygiene to kill hope. By having good reason to expect to be rejected, they are not caught off guard or bitterly disappointed when rejection comes. Others engage in the same behavior to repel people because they fear attracting an abuser or fear commitment. Like someone who chooses to live alone in a cave rather than risk being hit by lightning, such behavior is often an attempt to protect oneself from what are essentially the minor risks of life. To those “protecting” themselves this way, however, the risks seem very likely and terrifying dangers. Considering how unlikely it is for such things to devastate people, their view is statistically distorted, but it is usually statistically significant in terms of how often such things occurred in these people’s own experience. To enjoy life in all its richness, these people need to learn to trust again. We will look at how this can happen. Why Are We so Hard on Ourselves? To help explain why many of us have low self-esteem and are hard on ourselves, I will quote a portion of another webpage of mine:  Free Therapy . If you have already read it, feel free to  skip to the next section: The dangers of low self-esteem are more extensive than most of us realize. So many precious lives have been ruined or tragically shortened by unfounded or hideously distorted feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Young men and women of high morals can become so brainwashed into wrongly thinking themselves to be ‘trash’ that they end up needlessly cheapening themselves. It is common for people who are hurting to have been relentlessly brainwashed in their most impressionable years that they are ‘hopeless’ or ‘bad’ or ‘can’t do a thing right’ or are ‘not as capable as their brother or sister.’ These lies eventually come to be accepted as truth by the victims of these putdowns. Once our self-image hardens, we filter all new information to conform to our self-image. So when people say positive things about us, we disbelieve them or it hardly registers with us that the words were ever spoken, whereas we latch on to every negative comment as confirmation of our mistaken beliefs about ourselves. It is not uncommon to unconsciously surround ourselves with people who reinforce our poor self-image and to feel uncomfortable around more positive and/or well-respected or esteemed people. It is astounding, for example, how many daughters of alcoholics end up marrying alcoholics, despite promising themselves they would never do so. Even though we can only reform ourselves, never someone else, often these people marry alcoholics because they feel a strong compulsion to prove they can reform an alcoholic, since they see their father’s continued alcoholism as proof that they had failed. Of course, by entering such a marriage, they are setting themselves up for more pain and more things that they will mistakenly interpret as confirmation that they are ‘failures.’ Perhaps it was because he was not the first father she had known, a friend of mine regarded her step-father’s alcoholism as her mother’s responsibility and so felt no pressure to marry an alcoholic. However, her father’s actions caused her to feel unloved. This led her to marry the first man who would have her, since she presumed that no one else ever would. Her thirty-eight years of marriage were unhappy, largely because she had chosen to marry someone who was not good at communicating his love and she kept interpreting his every word and action to line up with her conviction that she was unlovable. I know someone whose mother has the psychological disorder of narcissism and is impossible to please. It seems more than coincidence that, until my friend grew in self-esteem, she kept ending up in jobs in which the boss was a female who was as impossible to please as her mother. In one job, her boss made enemies of everyone. In another, the boss surrounded herself with women whose spirit was broken because they came from abuse backgrounds and kept putting them down. My friend was only vaguely aware that her motivation in her job choices was to prove herself capable of winning the approval of someone like her mother, since she had failed to do this as a child. She picked jobs with bosses so much like her mother, however, that no one could ever win their approval. So my friend kept being put down, with the result that all her life experiences seemed to confirm her false self-image. The ways we can perpetuate a false self-image are almost endless, and men are just as susceptible as women. For example, I always assumed I was too undesirable for any woman to ever date me and I was never proved wrong because I was so sure that every woman would reject me that I never dared ask anyone for a date. For someone with low self-esteem, blaming oneself can feel so right that the person might not even bother to rationally examine the matter. Rebuilding one’s self-image can be as challenging as rebuilding a bombed house, and to break the habit of continually thinking negatively about ourselves can be as difficult as it is for a heavy smoker to quit smoking. What if it Really is Your Fault? Even if you truly have acted despicably and are highly blameworthy, you will still need to get past this and move on. Tormenting yourself helps no one. We will now briefly address those who needlessly blame themselves but further on in this webpage you will discover that your hope is boundless, regardless of how disgusting the offense and how much it is your fault. If you really are guilty of appalling atrocities, recovering from your past offenses in a morally and psychologically effective way is as important and as possible for you, as it is for the most blameless of people. Let’s for the moment, however, look at some common reasons for people being mistakenly convinced that something is their fault.   *  Hindsight is Unrealistic An obvious factor in self-blame is that hindsight empowers us to see with far greater clarity than was possible at the time. What is obvious afterwards, is seldom so obvious before events unfold. What at the time seemed a remote possibility looks certain after it happens. It is common when grieving the loss of a loved one, for example, to blame ourselves for things that were at the time largely beyond our control and/or ability to predict. What is obvious later is seldom obvious before events unfold. In real life, a person is often caught off guard and when things escalate he or she is paralyzed by shock. If you had suffered previous traumas that had certain similarities to a later predicament, instead of those experiences making you wiser, they could actually deaden your ability to avoid the situation, due to the crippling psychological force known as learned helplessness. Having once been subjected to a situation in which resistance was useless or achieved nothing (a child being overpowered or outwitted by an adult, for example) programs us to expect that in a similar situation, resistance will again be useless.   *  An Attempt to Feel in Control If the real offender were not you but someone emotionally important to you or someone you are dependent upon – a lover or family member, for example – the thought of concluding that that person is wrong or depraved can be so devastating that you find it easier to blame yourself than blame the offender. Wives who are economically and/or emotionally dependent upon an abusive husband, might rather believe it is their fault than try to cope with feeling trapped. To give another example, children desperately need the security of knowing that their parents are good, trustworthy people who will protect, comfort and nurture them. This need can be so intense that they will choose to believe they were at fault rather than face the terrifying reality that they are exposed to continual danger that is utterly beyond their control.   *  The High Status of the Offender If an abuser is someone highly respected, such as a community leader, the pressure can be immense to doubt one’s own judgment, rather than doubt the abuser’s integrity. If the person is esteemed as a spiritual authority, it might seem so unthinkable that he could be wrong that his opinions are regarded as being more trustworthy than one’s own conscience or biblical interpretation. Spiritual abuse then becomes a distinct possibility.   *  If Your Distress Originated During Childhood . . . If you were a child when the offense occurred, additional forces come into play, although they still influence us even as adults. Children have a powerful inbuilt drive to respect and believe adults or much older children. Their rapid development – often their very survival – hinges on it. In what only adults can recognize as a life-or-death situation, it is essential for children to obey immediately. Little children can learn and mature at the required rate only by unquestioning acceptance of what adults teach them. So when adults (or older children) do wrong, children not only lack the maturity and intellectual ability to realize it is wrong, they have a strong, natural urge to trust and obey. Adults can cruelly manipulate the emotions of their victims until tender consciences are shattered by an overwhelming burden of false guilt. If an abuser insists upon secrecy, it not only inflames the conviction that something shamefully wrong is occurring, it forces victims to keep their emotions dangerously bottled up.   *  Scrupulosity Few, if any, of us have a perfect conscience. Not even St Paul was sure about his conscience  (1 Corinthians 4:4) . Some mental conditions and/or spiritual attacks, however, render a person’s conscience extremely unreliable, causing them to feel excessively condemned over minor lapses, or things they have no control over. For instance, some forms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder give people uncontrollable bad thoughts. Not realizing that the thoughts are beyond human control, they end up blaming themselves for not being able to control the uncontrollable. Another example is a mental illness that causes people to worry that they have done something horrible that they never did. Regardless of how justified our guilt feelings are, however, once self-blame starts, we soon find ourselves imprisoned by a guilt-ridden cycle of self-loathing that simply gets harder and harder to break out of as the years grind on. The most saintly person on the planet has regrets, but once we view ourselves as unforgivable, motivation to keep doing the right thing usually vanishes in a swamp of hopelessness. It is only natural to act out our self-image, no matter how contrary to reality that self-image is. Many of us are tempted to magnify our own guilt and underrate the guilt of ‘respectable’ people. The reality, however, is that – except for Jesus – the best of earth’s inhabitants has at some time or another done inexcusable things. Trying to pretend we have never done the inexcusable is like trying to ignore cancer. We can’t simply ignore reasons for blaming ourselves. We must somehow find a highly legitimate way to forgive ourselves. Keep reading, and you will find the answers you need. A Life Transformed The truth that will heal you is so mind-boggling that I must reveal it carefully and gradually lest you think I am out of my mind. Let me start by proving that no matter how ridiculous they initially seem, these healing principles really work. I’ll do this by sharing with you Christine’s story. Past sexual abuse featured strongly in her torment. The source of your distress might be very different, but the secret of Christine’s transformation applies to us all. A key factor in Christine being freed from self-hate was the realization that she was innocent. The first thing she grasped through reading my webpages was that feeling pleasure when being sexually abused is a normal bodily reaction, not a moral issue. Just as feeling pain is an unavoidable response to being severely beaten, so is feeling pleasure an unavoidable response to being forcibly, but sensually, molested. That’s a helpful insight that almost any counselor could have provided, but then she discovered something far more powerful. Let’s read her story: I expect I’ll remember till my dying day exactly where I was standing when the truth exploded within me and set me free. I was on my cell phone talking to Grantley (writer of this webpage), thanking him for his webpages that explain that the sexual pleasure inflicted on me by my childhood abuser was not my fault. I was thrilled to finally realize that my sexual feelings were an involuntary reaction to the abuse and in no way suggest immorality on my part. I could sense that Grantley was hesitant; wanting to agree with me, but sounding as if I had missed something vital. “What if you hadn’t been so innocent?” he asked. “Would you then be doomed to live with crippling guilt for the rest of your life?” Grantley had studied to be a psychologist but after graduating with honors he abandoned the field because he had found a way of healing that has far more power than psychology offers. He began to remind me of an ancient spiritual truth that has transformed the lives of countless millions. Suddenly I realized the ultimate in liberating truths: I don’t have to try to justify myself because God has justified me! The Judge of all humanity sees me as not merely no worse than average people; he sees me as spotlessly pure and perfect, just like his holy Son. This might at first seem uncomfortably religious but hold on while I explain how it transformed my life. On the cross, the Innocent One swapped places with me; suffering my humiliation so that I could gain his endless honor and, to use the astounding expression the Bible uses, he has made  me  “the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). I had been aware of the truth before but now it hit me like a divine revelation. Suddenly Christ’s sacrifice became the most beautiful act ever made. I am fully accepted by the Judge of all humanity, the greatest intellect and highest moral authority in the universe, and since it was all finalized and sealed two thousand years ago, there is nothing I can do to mess it up. All I need do is cling to Jesus and bask in the wonder of what he has done for me and enjoy all the benefits. I am not just as good as most people but, in heaven’s eyes, I’m as pure and holy as God, because of Jesus – and I’m sharing this because it can be just as powerfully your experience as mine. It’s so mind-blowing that I’ve had to keep repeating the Scripture over and over to myself: 2 Corinthians 5:21  God made him [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of G od. Until making this discovery, whenever anyone criticized me I would go into a tailspin; not only inwardly agreeing with the putdown but telling myself that I’m incurably wicked and deserve to be treated as dirt and ruthlessly punished. Quickly, the oppressive feeling would balloon until it was so overwhelming that I felt compelled to hurt myself. After that, I’d feel so miserable that I’d fall into a vain attempt to comfort myself. Now, everything has changed! Is Christine Out of Her Mind? I interrupt Christine to admit that what she has been saying initially seems not merely ridiculous but downright impossible. To help you grasp a difficult concept would you mind letting your imagination run wild for a few moments before returning to cold reality? Suppose you had amnesia. After forgetting all of your past, snippets of memories are slowly returning. Eventually some of the jigsaw pieces slot together and to your horror you realize that in your past you had committed a hideous crime. For weeks you are petrified day and night that someone will find out and you’ll be jailed for life. Finally, you can bear the mental torment no longer. You turn yourself in to the police and confess. They confirm that you have correctly remembered part of your past. They inform you, however, that there are still parts you have forgotten. Years ago, you had been arrested and tried for that crime. You were given a surprisingly light sentence and you have already served the time. Imagine how relieved you would feel! Now let’s plunge back into icy reality. What has happened to you is similar, but even more amazing. You are horrified by snippets of your past that you recall. It is nightmare material. You have been hating yourself because you suppose you should continue to suffer, but what has been wiped from your consciousness is that there is a mysterious but very real sense in which you have already suffered for the past far, far more than you realize – so immensely, in fact, that every bit of punishment you deserve has been paid in full and you are now completely free. Now here comes the part that seems utterly ridiculous: you have already paid the full penalty because Jesus was tortured to death for your past, totally absorbing within himself all your shame, pain and blame until not a shred remained. “You’re mad!” you object, “Perhaps it somehow transformed Christine but no matter how kind Jesus might have been, and no matter what he did, he’s not me. What he did is largely irrelevant.” I have to admit that you are right – if Jesus were an ordinary person. What he achieved makes no sense until we realize that Jesus is not just a spectacularly special man, nor even the world’s greatest ever miracle worker; he is divine. With him, nothing is impossible. He is supernatural and he longs to give you the most profound supernatural experience imaginable – a supernatural union in which you and he merge with each other, melding into one so that, as the Bible declares, he is in you  and  you are in him. Since Jesus is no abuser, he seeks your full consent before proceeding, but he is so devoted to your lifelong well-being and eternal happiness that he wants to bond with you so that you and he are inseparable. When this happens, both of you have the same spiritual bank account, the same status, the same spiritual genes, the same past (that’s why he suffered) and the same future (that’s why your future is unbelievably bright).  Even though we Christians tend to understate it, this staggering miracle makes you a totally new being, complete with supernatural powers and immortality. Marriage makes a man and woman one flesh, with pooled assets and a shared destiny. Eventually their very genes permanently unite to form offspring. As this marvel commences with a few spoken words in a marriage ceremony, so a few words in a heart-felt prayer can usher in the spiritual transformation in which you and the spotlessly pure, eternal Son of God become one, with the same past and the same future. (For more about how you can experience this, see  You Can Find Love. ) Many of us feel that our stupidity or wickedness is so gross that it needs to be punished in some way – perhaps, for example, by continuing to feel shame or be miserable or think lowly of ourselves. But every trace of what we feel we should punish ourselves for has already been fully punished – with inhuman severity – when Jesus took upon himself all our imbecile goof-ups and depravity and was tortured to death for them. All the punishment was exhausted on him. There is nothing left. When you are in spiritual union with the holy Son of God, you both have the same past. What happened to Jesus happened to you, and what happened to you happened to Jesus. Do you think you should beat yourself up? He was literally beaten up. His skin was flayed to shreds. Think you should suffer? His agony was indescribable. Think you should die? It’s impossible to be deader than his corpse. And because it happened to him, it has already happened to you. When you and he are one, for you to get angry with yourself or fill with shame or despise yourself, is utterly needless. The person who did things worthy of such distress is not only dead and buried, he died almost two thousand years ago. Let me plunder a piece of fiction I wrote years ago: In my mind’s eye I saw myself charging into a burning building to rescue someone I loved more than life itself. Every movement began to slow down. Shielding her body, I suffer horrific burns to carry her to safety, where I collapse, writhing in agony. But it is worth every throb of pain because the love of my life is completely untouched by the fire. All that matters is that she’s unharmed. Seeing my wounds she says, “I don’t deserve such love!” I look on in horror as, overwhelmed by a feeling of unworthiness, she then runs back into the fire and kills herself; breaking my heart by her death and rendering all my suffering an utter waste. I had been on the brink of treating my heroic Savior like that. How dare I let Jesus’ agony be wasted! If I beat myself, Jesus was beaten for nothing. If I get angry with myself, Jesus bore God’s wrath for nothing. If I let shame overwhelm me, Jesus was humiliated for nothing. If I think of myself as morally defiled, the Innocent One was treated as a criminal for nothing. If I think I’m inferior, the King of kings was treated as dirt for nothing. The Lord of all suffered horrifically to give me the right of access to all God’s riches. For his sake, I must refuse to throw aside such a costly sacrifice. For some reason – sheer love I guess – he considered me worth it. I won’t let him down. No matter what false feelings flood over me, I’ll refuse to believe them. I’ll enjoy life for his sake. “FOR HIS SAKE!” I yelled. At last I found peace. “Yes, for Jesus’ sake!” I shouted in joyous relief, “For the sake of the One who died for me!” By thinking of myself as unworthy, I was seeing myself as I truly would be had Jesus never hung upon the cross for me. But he  was  crucified. He was tortured to death to swap my sin for his sinlessness. He took my guilt and gave me his innocence. And here I was on the brink of pushing it aside and, by caving into feelings of inferiority, reducing to a senseless waste his agonizing death for me. Some children are scolded under the guise of the putdown helping to make them good. Some carry that thought into adulthood. But for us to be putdown or ridiculed doesn’t make us good. What makes us good is our innocent Lord being so fully subjected to God’s righteous anger on our account that there is no condemnation left. And in exchange for him taking our humiliation, idiotic mistakes and evil upon himself, he gives us his moral perfection and dignity. Christ’s nature and achievements are so much ours that Scripture states such things as: John 17:22  I have given them the glory that you gave me . . . 1 Corinthians 1:30   . . . you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God – that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 1 Corinthians 2:16   . . . we have the mind of Christ. 2 Peter 1:4   . . . he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature . . . He became human so that divinity could flow through you. The Eternal died so that you could be more alive than ever before; took on your mortality to give you immortality. He wore your limitations so you could enjoy his infinity. The Almighty crumbled with your weakness to give you supernatural strength. The Pride of the universe agonized with your loneliness so that you would never be alone again; suffered your isolation so that you and he could be inseparable. The King of kings bore your shame and darkness so that you could be radiant with his honor; was humiliated with your depravity to infuse you with his holy majesty; lowered himself to the dust of death so that you could be enthroned with him in highest heaven. God’s noble Son shamed himself with your foolishness to give you his intellect; exchanging your dirty, cloudy thinking for his crystal purity; suffering for your idiotic blunders so that you could be dignified as a superior being, graced with divine wisdom. He let your sorrow crush him to let you beam with his joy; was impoverished by your debts so that you could revel in his riches. He absorbed within himself all your inadequacies so that you could overflow with his abundance. Through your union with the holy King of kings, every trace of filth has been flushed out by a torrent of divine purity; all your guilt replaced by pristine innocence; all your shame by royal dignity; all your ugliness transformed into dazzling beauty. You are exalted to the very heavens as someone worthy of eternal honor. Who could think lowly of such a person? What makes it hardest for us to believe that we can enjoy this holy union that frees us from the pain, blame and shame of our past is that we know we don’t deserve it. “Why would God suffer such agony to lavish his goodness upon  me ?” we ask in utter bewilderment. The answer is that it is God’s very nature to do such things. He is a giver, not a taker. There is more that is mind boggling about him than the incomprehensible immensity of his physical power and intellect. God doesn’t just love us sometimes, he  is  love – overwhelmingly powerful, pure, selfless love that refuses to give up or count the cost. I am reluctant to use the “L” word when talking about God. Too few people understand that genuine love has nothing to do with lust. Even those not using the word to con and exploit and hurt people, tend to use it as an excuse to seek their own happiness and pamper their egos. With so many people misusing the word, the true meaning drains away and it mutates into something hideous. True love is so exquisitely beautiful and rare that you might not have witnessed even a shadow of it in humanity. Divine love is selfless giving taken to extreme levels. It is pure, nonsexual, humble, self-sacrificing and wants nothing but the other person’s greatest good. This rare beauty overwhelms God’s heart and flows freely to us all. He gives and gives and gives, not because of anything in us, but because of his goodness. He is so filled, driven and intoxicated by unlimited kindness, generosity, gentleness and purity that it is impossible for him to stop wanting to give you the best in his uniquely glorious, selfless, holy way. This is hard for us to believe because it is so contrary to our experience with humans. But God is utterly different to frail humanity. He knows no human inadequacies, selfishness or lust. He is kind, warm and gentle, yet all-powerful and flawless. His motives are pure. Now let’s return to Christine: Grantley taught me how to gain maximum benefit from my new understanding of how loved and accepted I am by God. I can now stop myself from spiraling out of control. I can pull myself out of a nose dive the instant it begins. Here’s how it works: the moment I sense myself beginning to feel negative about myself I inwardly shout, “No, that’s not true!” and begin thanking God that because of Jesus, God accepts me and believes in me. The Perfect One thinks I’m important, declares me to be good and pure and righteous, and has wonderful plans for my life. On and on I go, reminding myself of how loved by God I am; thanking and praising Jesus for being punished and despised so that I need never despise myself. As I continue, savoring the implications of the cleansing that is mine through Christ, and of me being royalty – a child of the King of kings – I force myself to rejoice in all of God’s goodness to me. As I keep this up, my spirit soars to the point where the urge to put myself down fades and I feel no need to seek empty comfort by degrading myself by former habits. Just as bad habits are hard to break, good habits are hard to build. It’s been hard to keep remembering each time I begin to enter a downward spiral to pull myself up, tell myself, “No, that’s not true!” and begin thanking God for the way he sees me through rose-colored glasses – through the precious blood of Jesus drained for me. And it’s been hard dredging up a multitude of positive things about God’s view of me to keep thanking God for, and to keep praise flowing for long enough for my depressing thoughts to fade. But as I keep persisting, it is getting easier and easier, and I’m discovering that, once established, good habits grow strong and serve us well. I’ve also learnt to, as it were, put money in the bank for a rainy day. Even when things are going well I regularly rehearse uplifting Scriptures and savor God’s love. Then when oppressive thoughts cloud in, I have in my mind a ready store of positive material to recall that will enrich my thinking. Gradually, to think well of myself – seeing myself through God’s eyes – is becoming second nature to me. As a result, self-hate is becoming a thing of the past. Moreover, life is becoming more exciting than ever before. Christ’s sacrifice is my anchor. No matter how violently stormy seas bounce me around, I’m safe because the anchor of my soul is embedded in the immovable, two-thousand-year-old bedrock of the holy Son of God swapping places with me. Christ has made me acceptable and lovable. It was settled two thousand years ago and nothing can change it. The Almost Unbelievable Your self-esteem has been so crushed that it will take you enormous effort for even a small fraction of these truths to sink in, but since, as the proverb says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, it is important to begin by making every effort to try to absorb the following and doing your utmost to resist the temptation to imagine that you – or anyone else – could somehow nullify the infinity of God’s love. Why I Admire People Tempted to Hate Themselves People who feel so tormented that they feel like hating themselves unquestionably deserve deep compassion. More than this, however, they fill me with admiration. Here is one reason: Almost everyone engaged in self-hate sees himself as a loser but in my eyes every such person is not just a winner but a hero. I know how right your negative view of yourself  feels  to you but, nevertheless, I am certain that my view is the most realistic one. To explain, I’ll quote something I’ve written elsewhere: An athlete, in the midst of a record-breaking run, has never in his life been so fit and strong. Yet his pain-racked body may have never felt so weak. Likewise, in the midst of a spiritual trial, it is not uncommon to be stronger and yet feel weaker than ever before. And to fellow Christians you might seem hopeless. An ultra-marathon champion staggering up the final hill looks pathetic. A child could do better. Anyone not understanding what this man has gone through would shrink from him in disgust. Only someone with all the facts would be awed by his stamina as he stumbles on. Consider Scott and his team, who struggled to the South Pole only to discover their honor of being the first to reach the Pole was lost forever. Amundsen had beaten them by about a month. To add to the futility, they endured further blizzards, illness, frostbite and starvation only to perish; the last three dying just a few miles from safety. Yet today their miserable defeat ending with death in frozen isolation, witnessed by not a living soul, is hailed as one of the greatest ever epics of human exploration and endurance. Every fiber of my being is convinced that their glory is just a shadow of what you can achieve. Though you suffer in isolation and apparent futility, with the depths of your trial known to no one on earth, your name could be blazed in heaven’s lights, honored forever by heaven’s throngs for your epic struggle with illness, bereavement, or whatever. The day is coming when what is endured in secret will be shouted from the housetops. Look at Job: bewildered, maligned, misunderstood; battling not some heroic foe but essentially common things - a financial reversal, bereavement, illness; - not cheered on by screaming fans, just booed by some one-time friends. If even on this crazy planet Job is honored today, I can’t imagine the acclaim awaiting you when all is revealed. Your battle with life’s miseries can be as daring as David’s encounter with Goliath. Don’t worry that others don’t understand this at present. One day they will. And that day will never end. Anyone feeling drawn to self-hate is suffering immense inner agony and yet instead of going the cowardly way of suicide he staggers on. That is heroic. Here’s yet another reason for people who hate themselves capturing my admiration: If you analyze it you will discover that what drives most people to self-hate is distress over their continual failure to reach the standards they believe they should achieve. They are so hard on themselves, however, that they forget that a lesser person would reduce his inner pain by lowering his standards – something self-haters won’t let themselves do. They continue to maintain their ideals even though it brings them deep torment. How admirable is that! Sadly, self-loathing could have so wounded you that not only this, but much of the following, will initially stagger belief or bounce off as if it did not apply to you. Imagine someone languishing in poverty despite receiving a check for ten million dollars. With the gift seeming too good to be true, he presumed it must be a hoax and never bothered to cash the check. I beg you not to be like that person. Please don’t miss out simply because what the good Lord has done seems too good to be true. Even though God’s standards are terrifyingly higher than ours, anyone thinking himself not good enough is seeing things through human eyes, not divine eyes. Jesus, the eternal Son of God, reaches the Holy Lord’s humanly unattainable standards of absolute perfection. Again, this will seem unbelievable or irrelevant mumbo jumbo without serious grappling with truth and seeking divine revelation. You Are a Sophisticated Being I claw at words trying to describe you. Words like noble, regal, intelligent, important and valuable all fall short. “Priceless” and “irreplaceable” are applicable but still fail to embrace the full magnificence of who you are. You are God-like – and you are not some shabby imitation of God but the Almighty God of Perfection  made  you with God-like qualities. Genesis 1:27  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. This is solid proof that when the Bible speaks of “man” or “men” in general, it applies with equal force to females as to males. It is so important to God that we grasp this gender issue that he lays it out in the very beginning of the Bible. Moreover, Scripture also implies that God’s nature is most fully reflected not by males alone but by a combination of what is distinctively masculine and what is distinctively feminine. So, under the inspiration of God himself, Genesis 1:27, is declaring that, without exception, every human is in the image of the divine. Tragically, many children have been so grossly mistreated that they grow up to feel less than human. The devastating feeling of being less than human can be so strong that that degrading feeling can seem to be the truth. No matter how loudly they scream, however, mere feelings cannot change what God pronounces to be true. The truth is that you are fully human, which means you reflect the very nature of God – so much so that Jesus said, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’?” (John 10:34). Jesus was referring to this Scripture: Psalms 82:6-7  “I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’ But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler.” In this Word from God, our mortality – a consequence of our fallen nature – is brutally recognized and yet still the Godlike aspects of our nature remain undeniable. Finally, here are two more Scriptures affirming how exalted all humans are: Psalm 139:14  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. Psalm 8:3-4  When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet. You Are Not Alone Let’s briefly explore several aspects to the comforting, liberating truth that no matter how alone you feel, you are not alone. There is something devastatingly lonely and isolating about pain. No one but God could slip inside your head and feel your pain. And how you feel just cannot be put into words. Yet we yearn to break the torment of solitary confinement and be understood. We yearn to express the inexpressible. A friend who has despised herself for what she has suffered is discovering something amazing flowing from the unique way that her suffering connects her with other hurting people: it empowers her to bring them hope and comfort like no one who has had an easier life can possibly achieve. Her suffering broke God’s heart and was the tragic consequence of living in a world that refuses to imitate God but acts in rebellion against his kind, gentle, loving ways. Nevertheless, that suffering has lifted her to a place of special honor in God’s eyes because it puts her in a unique position to help other suffering people – all of whom are so dear to his heart. To her astonishment, she has discovered that her past anguish, rather than being the useless waste it had once seemed, has immense meaning and value. You Are Totally Known and Understood Earlier we stated the obvious: No one but God could slip inside your head and feel your pain. But guess what! That is exactly what God does! “Laugh, and the world laughs with you, cry, and you cry alone,” can only be true if you leave God out of the equation. And the stupendous news is that we don’t have to leave God out. You are of such astounding importance and value to the Lord of the universe that every minute aspect of your life captivates his attention. He knew you and yearned for your companionship long before you had ever heard of him – before you even gained consciousness, in fact. He cares for you so much that ever since the moment of your conception, God has been with you, observing the multiplication of your every cell as you slowly formed within the womb. Invest time trying to contemplate the overwhelming vastness of the number of grains of sand in a single bucket. Then multiply that by the total amount of sand on every beach on the entire planet and add the grains of sand in every desert. That incomprehensible number is equivalent to the number of thoughts God has had about you. Whether you are asleep or awake, no detail of your life, no matter how hidden and secret or insignificant or embarrassing, past or future will ever escape his intimate awareness. He has known your every thought and he knew every word you would speak before you even uttered it. And this mind-bogglingly intense level of concern for you will keep hurtling on like an unstoppable freight train fueled by limitless love for all eternity. Add infinite intelligence to this unlimited knowledge and you are totally understood – not just more than any other human can possibly understand you but exceedingly more than you could even hope to understand yourself. In the most intensely intimate, infinitely detailed sense of the word, God  knows  what you are going through. Keep reading and you will see that your pain matters – so astoundingly so that, rather than luxuriate in ease, the most important Person in the entire cosmos would willingly suffer every trace of your pain for you. The stupendous Lord of the Galaxies, the Source of all beauty, feels for you so immensely that it would actually relieve his distress for him to fully bear your torment himself. You are not alone: even though you are rarely even conscious of it, from the moment of your conception and for the rest of eternity you have the ultimate companion who is infinitely concerned about the tiniest aspects of your life. God Has Taken Your Pain Upon Himself God is highly personal. He is no machine storing incomprehensibly vast quantities of information. God is love. Infinite love not only cares enough to want to know everything about you; love  feels . Your pain and distress sends him reeling in pain. Even imperfect humans can love with such intensity that they would rather suffer themselves than see their loved one suffer. And this is what God has done. Study this: Isaiah 53:4  Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows . . . he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. . . . the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. . . . for the transgression of my people he was stricken.  . . . the LORD makes his life a guilt offering . . . he will bear their iniquities. . . . For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. It is almost as if the magnitude of the agony God feels in identifying with your distress drove him to self-harm – except that it was so much more than just an emotional reaction; it was the meticulously planned solution for your needs. By identifying with you so utterly that he was tortured to death on your behalf, the eternal Son of God opened the way for your healing and other wonders of immense significance in your life. Now all that it takes is for you to accept it. Just as marriage requires not just love and commitment from one partner, but the other must also agree to the union, so it is with you and God. No matter how much love yearns to help, love refuses to force itself upon another. At whatever personal cost it takes, love restrains itself until the loved one is willing to receive. You Are Valued Beyond Measure To explain, let me quote from something I’ve written elsewhere: A diamond is just a bit of rock. It can’t love, talk, think. Its worth is based not on what it can do but on what people are willing to pay for it. Diamonds are considered of great value simply because people will pay much to have one. You are far more precious to God than tons of diamonds and he paid a far higher price than all the wealth of a million earths to have you as his best friend. You have an irreplaceable place in God’s own heart. He loves you dearly and tenderly and devotedly. He paid the highest possible price – the willing sacrificial death of his holy Son – to have you as his best friend. Is God Impressed When I Beat Myself Up? It was the showdown: Elijah versus 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah (1 Kings 18:19, NIV). Whose God was more powerful? The Baal devotees prayed. No response. They prayed some more – and more and more. Still no response. Things were getting desperate. They used their ultimate weapon in getting their god to respond: 1 Kings 18:28-29  So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed. Midday passed, and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice. But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention. We can be strongly tempted to act like them; thinking that God or loved ones might take pity on us if we treat ourselves harshly enough or make ourselves sufficiently miserable. But God’s heart is already breaking over your distress. The last thing the loving, tender Lord wants is for you to further increase your suffering. In the Bible, those who treated themselves harshly were pagans who did not understand the heart of God. The emphatic teaching of Jesus is that faith is the key to answered prayer and to moving the hand of God. That makes praising God explosively powerful because praise is faith so purified and concentrated as to reduce problems to dust. Praising and thanking God are not reserved for when things go well. They form a lethal spiritual weapon against everything that seeks to distress, depress or destroy us. Ephesians 5:20  always giving thanks to God the Father for everything . . . Philippians 4:6  Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition,  with thanksgiving , present your requests to God. Colossians 3:17  And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus,  giving thanks  to God the Father through him. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18  Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Hebrews 13:15  Through Jesus, therefore, let us  continually  offer to God a sacrifice of praise . . .  (Emphasis mine) This is what Christine was working on. Her automatic, unthinking response to distress had been to despise herself and treat herself badly. Now she is establishing a new way of responding. This new habit, instead of acting like a drug that brings temporary relief but actually worsens the situation, is healing her inner pain, and dissipating her distress. Instead of  begging  God to intervene, she puts running shoes on her faith by thanking and praising God for loving and purifying and beautifying and exalting her. When feeling down, thanking and praising God is as hard as dragging yourself out of a cozy bed on an icy morning, but despite the effort it takes, you soon discover that praising God transports you from frigid depression to the cheery warmth of victory over defeatism. Louise, who often suffers deep depression, wrote a beautiful poem about a shoot pushing through a seed until finally emerging into the sunshine, only to be hit by the stench of fertilizer. That fertilizer, however, causes it to grow. Gradually the stench disappears and the plant blooms, producing a beautiful fragrance. “Beauty comes at a price,” says  her poem, which I suggest you read. In a personal e-mail to me, Louise made a comment about the poem that I’m reluctant to share because of the language but it will be very meaningful to many readers: I keep saying, I am a piece of ----, but I am not. I am, however, covered with it from time to time in order to grow, to push up through it and be strengthened by it. Practical Help Anyone wrestling with self-hate is in a uniquely stressful dilemma. In any act of hate and/or verbal putdowns, to be the victim is traumatic. It is even traumatic to be the attacker, since the attacker must act contrary to good conscience. But in self-hate, you are both the victim and the offender. How traumatic is that! How can you flee from your enemy when you are your own enemy? How can you get any joy out of the defeat of your enemy when you are that enemy? Forgiving oneself is a critical ingredient of feeling good about oneself and ending self-hate. Over the years, very many hurting people have shared their secrets with me. Their experiences have rammed home to me that forgiving oneself, feeling forgiven by God, and forgiving other people, travel together. They might separate a little, but progress with one type of forgiveness moves the others forward; holding back with one, holds back the others. So here’s a practical tip of great importance in ending self-hate: when, despite your best efforts, you seem to have reached a stalemate with one type of forgiveness, try working on one or both of the other types. Each type of forgiveness can be exceedingly stubborn but as you keep working on all three, while looking to God for supernatural help, one of the three will eventually move a little and this will make progress on the others a little easier. Since they are travel mates, each type of forgiveness is critical to feeling good about yourself and hence reducing the pressure to despise yourself. We dare not neglect any of the three types of forgiveness, so let’s list them one final time: *  feeling/believing you are forgiven by God *  forgiving yourself *  forgiving other people Becoming Whole We can kid ourselves that burying or hiding past difficulties proves us to be the “strong silent type” but the truth is very different. It prevents us from emotionally connecting and coming to terms with what is really troubling us. It can keep us perpetually distressed; one possible manifestation of which can be self-hate. Acting this way can not only cause enormous problems, it is inconsistent with the Healing Lord’s ways. The God of truth says such things as: Proverbs 28:13  He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy. James 5:16  Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. . . . 1 Chronicles 28:9   . . . the LORD searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts. . . . Psalms 44:21   . . . he knows the secrets of the heart. 1 Corinthians 4:5   . . . He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. Hebrews 4:13  Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. This is not scary because, as stated in Proverbs 28 (quoted above), even when sin is involved, it is only the person who conceals it who has cause for alarm. Like air into a vacuum, divine mercy and forgiveness rush in to fill whoever admits to sin and genuinely wants to be free from it. The beautiful thing is that we never have to revisit the dark places alone. We can take with us a warm Friend who dispels darkness. He is the Light of the world. We don’t have to fear our emotions because we have a God who deeply understands and empathizes. Jesus himself prayed “with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7). Elsewhere it says about Jesus: Hebrews 4:15-18  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. We don’t have to fear our emotions getting out of control, because he will carefully monitor them. He will not allow us to suffer what we cannot bear (1 Corinthians 10:13). And if we have anger, bitterness or hate, he does not condemn but freely forgives and cleanses, and empowers us to resolve destructive attitudes so that we can heal. Breakthrough I have a down-to-earth prayer that could change your life. I’m not asking you to pray it. Simply read it. If you find it expresses your heart, you could then turn it into a prayer by reading it to God. Dear God, Could it really be that you are gentle and loving towards me? It seems too good to be true. I’ve loathed myself more times than I can count and I’ve assumed you felt like I do about myself. Could it really be that you see me so differently and are eager to warmly embrace me with your forgiveness and approving smile? You are an infinite God, so I concede that you have infinite love. That has to mean that your love far exceeds my own. But you are terrifyingly holy. How could you be less judgmental towards my failings than I am? Could Jesus dying for my sins have made  that  much difference? Could it really be that at last the pressure is off and I can bask in the sunshine of Almighty God knowing all about me and yet fully accepting me as his precious child? Could I be like Saint Paul, who saw himself as the worst of sinners and yet be special to God? Like that man of God, could I say, “ . . . but what I hate I do.  . . . nothing good lives in me . . . the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing. What a wretched man I am! . . .” and then immediately follow that pathetic lamentation with, “Thanks be to God . . . Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 7:15,18,19,24,25; 8:1)? I need more than fire insurance against hell. To live with myself I need somehow to be able to see myself as being of immense value and morally good. Is this possible for  me? You have given your word that if I confess my sins, you will cleanse me from  all  unrighteousness, and in that same promise you vow you will do this not because I reach some arbitrary standard (we’ve all fallen short, anyhow – Romans 3:23) but simply because  you  are faithful and just (1 John 1:9). It would be so wonderful to be cleansed. According to the Scripture just mentioned, you and I, Lord, both have a role to play in bringing this about. You have to be faithful and just; I have to confess my failings. I don’t have to ask you to do your part. Since you are perfect and good, you’ll never be anything but faithful and just. So I’ll do my part and confess to all the things that make me feel so awful– what I’ve done and even what has been done to me that devastates me. I’d prefer to bury the past and live in denial, but the truth is that the past still eats at me, no matter how much I try to suppress it. My sins and the acts of those who have sinned against me seem too disgusting for you to want to hear about them, and yet you are so interested in everything that hurts me that you ask me to confess them – to tell you about them. I don’t find this easy, but I’ve already prolonged my torment for far too long. I need to get this over and done with, so here goes . . . [I suggest you now share your heart with God, pouring out to him details of all the things that tend to make you feel guilty, ashamed or uncomfortable. You might find it helpful to write it out as a letter to God. Any moral means of expressing your heart to God touches him deeply.] Jesus was tortured to death to secure my forgiveness and yet here I am still torturing myself and at times wishing I were dead, as if I were unforgivable, when Jesus sealed my forgiveness two thousand years ago. Forgiveness certainly isn’t my strong point. I remember when Saul, who later become the great apostle Paul, was still hating and scheming to hurt Christians, the risen Lord suddenly appeared and said, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (Acts 26:14). I’m told the picture is of an ox angrily kicking against a spike. Every time the ox kicks, he hurts only himself. Have I been like that? Am I hurting myself every time I inwardly lash out in anger or unforgiveness against you or against those who have hurt me? I recall the Lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” Could it be that my difficulty in believing that my sins have been divinely forgiven – supernaturally wiped out – is connected to my reluctance to forgive those who have sinned against me? I wish Jesus hadn’t kept linking me receiving the forgiveness I crave with me forgiving others. How can I forgive anyone else when I find it so hard to forgive myself? And yet somehow these different types of forgiveness are inseparably bound, like different facets on the same diamond. I desperately need to forgive myself and to enjoy your forgiveness, so by an act of will, whether I feel like it not, I activate the remaining aspect of forgiveness. I choose to forgive all who have hurt me. I don’t excuse what they did, nor pretend that what they did was even slightly defensible, but nevertheless, I forgive, just as I want you to forgive me. “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst,” said Saint Paul (1 Timothy 1:15). He did some atrocious things, including torturing innocent Christians in the hope of forcing them to blaspheme the One who died for their salvation and turn their back on their Savior. Even if I were a thousand times worse than I’ve ever imagined, however, it cannot change the fact that Jesus died for the full forgiveness of the very worst of sinners – whoever that might be. So forgiveness is mine through Jesus swapping places with me on the cross and letting himself be shamed and violated so that I could be honored. I gladly remove my filthy, sin-stained clothes that fill me with shame. Here they are, Lord: I hand you my guilt and condemnation, placing it upon the bleeding body of my Savior and trade my shame for your forgiveness and the divine purity and honor that it brings. In exchange for my dirty rags, I put on Jesus’ robe of righteousness. Your forgiveness clothes me from head to toe. I accept you as Lord, and now, through the supernatural transformation you promise, I am born of you. As your Word boldly declares, I am your righteousness because of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Now we belong to each other. We are one. No matter how atrocious my failings and how much they haunt me, the truth is that in God’s eyes all of us have messed up so badly that Jesus had to suffer a torturous death for us all. The degree of sin isn’t the issue. Without Christ, we are all in the same hopeless predicament, doomed to hell, but no matter how alone and hopeless I often feel, the truth is that I am  not  without Christ. As Jesus took upon himself my gross inadequacies and shame, I take upon myself his sinlessness and glory. Your righteousness is now my righteousness and your honor is my honor. From now on I will live for you and honor you just as you devote yourself to me and shower me with your honor. I don’t need to despise myself for anything because on the cross Jesus has already been despised for it. That’s so mind-boggling that I need to repeat it: the Person who will judge all humanity volunteered to be shamed so that I would have no need to be shamed – neither punished by God nor by me. Help me grasp the full implications so that this becomes not mere doctrine but life-changing reality. You pronounce me to be a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:21) – an excitingly new divine masterpiece, a work of art crafted by the Master himself. No matter what I see in the mirror, you, the Almighty Lord, declare me to be a totally new person, sparkling with the glory of God; nothing like what I used to be or how I used to see myself. I admit that I don’t feel like a new creature – in fact, I feel as bad as ever – but you don’t lie. I look at myself and see nothing new. I still don’t like what I see. But you say that those whom you declare to be good – your royal children – walk by faith not sight. So I need to believe you, and so believe I am different, no matter what I feel. I am one with Jesus, the holy Son of God, so all the pressure to be good enough, all the humiliation of my past, and all the fear of divine rejection is over. I want to honor you by breaking out of my former pattern of thinking. Like breaking any habit, it will be hard work but I will do my utmost to act like Christine, so that every time I catch myself beginning to think poorly of myself I will say, “No, that’s not true!” and start thanking you for who I am in your loving eyes. Thank you that although you require my full cooperation, me thinking this way is important to you because you are selflessly devoted to wanting the best for me. The above can initiate a powerful transformation within you, but it is like a spark that will blaze into a huge fire, or be quickly extinguished, depending on whether it is protected and fed. In order to ensure that it changes your life, you need to explore all the links below. Each webpage leads to many others, but if you are battling self-hate they are most important for your welfare. I suggest you bookmark or record the web address of this page so that you don’t lose this list, and before even commencing the list, read  Serious, Do-It Yourself Healing From Emotional Pain . It is crammed with helpful insights into our strong tendency when things go badly wrong to want to blame ourselves, God or others. It explains why this is so destructive and how Jesus’ death formed the perfect and totally satisfying cure.   Keys to Feeling Good About Yourself You Can Find Love How to be one with Jesus Forgiving Yourself Being Convinced About God’s Love for You Being Convinced that God has Forgiven You Forgiving Those who have Hurt You How to Change Your Self-Image & Boost Self-Esteem Courage to Heal Survivors share secrets to healing from sex abuse Healing From Sexual Abuse A vast resource of comfort and support Where Was God When You Suffered Unspeakable Horrors? Feel Ugly? Could You Have a Distorted Body Image? Revenge! “I hate myself!” Christian help when you hate yourself A page that provides many more valuable links

The Poem By Louise Plaskett Under the half-frozen soil A seed awakens And starts to push away its shell Putting forth a tiny, shivering shoot Through the dark soil it travels On its upward climb to light Until, one day The crust of springtime’s earth splits before the thrust And the green shoot rejoices As the world of light opens before it And the warm rays of yellow sunshine Welcome it and beckon to it with encouragement. Suddenly, little shoot feels the stinky impact Of a shovel full of aged manure And wonders why it tried so hard to leave its safe seed. Warm rain falls and the stench lessens As the sinking nourishment unites with the ground Feeding the baby plant, that it thrive Its roots established in softened, enriched soil Until the day when the first bloom appears. No hint of foul odor mars its perfume The dark humus a perfect backdrop For the beauty of the garden. Do you ever feel as if someone threw manure on you? After struggling through the darkness Finally, a ray of light And before you can enjoy it Buried in excrement! To have to push further up Through the unpleasantness. But the trial will settle The Water of Life will mix it with good soil To enhance growth And when your bloom hits its apex And wafts sweetened fragrance to the wind around you You will shine A glorious flower in the garden of God. Beauty comes at a price So wade in the fertilizer and don’t choke on it And don’t abandon your brothers when they’re covered in it Grow above it by the strength of Abba, through Jesus Drinking in His refreshing rains, washed by Him, together Basking in His Sunshine together Reaching up out of it together Blooming together Until faithful love’s perfume makes His garden a treat to the senses All over the earth And rises as a sweet incense offering to Heaven. In the autumn of our lives When our petals droop, wither, and die That incense will bloom above eternally Before the face of the Master Gardener. Back To: Page about Self-Hate

To God, You Are Special! Why, in God’s Eyes, You are Irreplaceable You might not like yourself and you might be convinced that everyone on this planet feels the same way about you, but God is mind-bogglingly superior to everyone on this planet – not just in power but in his warmth and in the depth of his feelings for you. So intense is the Almighty that he loves you as if there were no one in the universe but you. One reason for this is that there is genuinely no one in the universe like you. There has never been and never will be, another you. God has made no one in the universe just like you. He treasures your uniqueness. Not only are your facial features unique, along with each of your fingerprints, toe prints, palm prints, footprints, voice print, iris patterns and the DNA in every cell of your body, but evidence is mounting that everyone has a unique typing rhythm, walking gait, ECG (heartbeat) and on and on we could go. In fact, with sufficiently sophisticated analysis, just about every tiny aspect of you is unmatched by anyone who has ever lived. Even if God were to abandon his commitment to making everything unique, and he chose to craft someone with an absolutely identical body and intellect to yours, your experiences are utterly unparalleled. Every conversation you have ever had, all your personal choices, your precise place in time and space throughout your existence, the total array of every sight and sound and object that has ever touched and shaped you, could be matched in no one else. No one in the universe has ever had exactly the same combination of thoughts that you had in the last hour, and the same applies for every single hour of your entire life. Even, if you go to sufficient detail, your exact mishmash of sins is unique, providing God with a unique challenge (and he is certainly up to it!) to transform your life into something beautiful. In countless trillions of ways no one’s full story or testimony has ever been, nor will ever be, like yours. You might be ho-hum about that, but it fires God. If you don’t think much of yourself, your uniqueness might mean little to you, but to someone passionately in love with you, your distinctiveness makes you utterly irreplaceable. To whoever loves you, it means that there is no substitute for you in the entire universe. To a stranger you might just be one of millions, but not to someone who truly loves you. If a child in a large family died, no sane person would dare try consoling the grieving parents by saying, “Don’t worry, you can easily adopt another child.” Not one, not a hundred, not a thousand children could ever replace that child, and neither could a trillion dollars. If imperfect human love perceives the uniqueness of a loved one and delights in that uniqueness to the point of making that person irreplaceable, this is magnified stupendously in the way God feels about you. Everything that distinguishes you means so very much to the God of infinite detail who keeps track of every hair on your head. To mind-boggling extremes he is the most attentive of lovers. You move him, you fascinate him, you captivate him. In the nicest, most respectful possible way, the infinite God of love is, as it were, infatuated with you. Nevertheless, if you push him away, he will not abuse his power, violating the dignity he has decided to grace you with, by forcing himself upon you. Instead, the All-powerful One selflessly chooses to endure the pain and suffer his heartache in secret. Truly, the Lord of the universe is worthy of all power because he wields it with matchless nobility and exquisite selflessness. The Perfect One is not too good to be true, but far too good to be human. He totally eclipses everyone in being worthy of your time and your unerring devotion. You are loved. You are respectfully but passionately desired. You ’re special to God, not because of your greatness but because of the greatness of his love. It ’s not that you are perfect but that his love is perfect. You can kick off your shoes, slip off your masks and rest in that love. Make yourself cozy, let your cares float away and bask in his love. Lie in the warmth as you snuggle content and enjoy that love. Let go of your sin, luxuriate in peace, knowing the reality that God is love. The Almighty is never half-hearted about anything. He loves you not with part of his heart but with all his heart. And this astounding Person who loves with his whole heart knows no limit. He is infinite. The implications threaten to fry every circuit in the human brain. In the late nineteenth century, mathematical genius, Georg Cantor, proved that no matter how much you add to infinity or subtract from it or divide it or multiply it, the result is still infinity. Despite any of those mathematical procedures, infinity is so mind-bogglingly different to anything finite that the quantity remains unchanged. Fuelled by this finding, let’s blast off on a ridiculous fantasy flight. If the God of infinite love could somehow love someone else a trillion times more than he loves you, he would still love you and the other person exactly the same – infinity. If his love for you could somehow be diminished to only a trillionth of his current love for you, his love for you would still be infinite. A friend of mine who had been so hurt that he had never before let himself love anyone, began to fall in love with God. This scared him because his love for God meant that if God were to reject him it would hurt deeply. I explained that there is nothing to fear about the perfect love of God. Human love is at best imperfect, and anyone with imperfect love might stop loving and if so, the human might reject a person or turn nasty. But because God’s love is perfect he keeps loving and loving and loving and will never reject anyone or hurt anyone. Tragically, people reject him and leave him, but for as long as their hearts beat, he keeps longing for them to come back into his warm, welcoming arms. Creator God, Almighty Ruler of the galaxies, sees in you things he sees in no one else – and it thrills him. And not only does God treasure you as irreplaceable, there is no one in the universe – not even his matchless Eternal Son – that he loves more than you. This latter astounding truth is expounded in the third link below. In the meantime, cling to the truth that in the heart of the all-powerful Lord is a craving, an ache, a longing that nothing but your companionship can ever satisfy. For the God who might seem to have everything, only you will do.

Positive Confession? Or Living in Denial? Brave or Stupid? Many of us have an inner wound due to some highly unpleasant past event and until it is healed it is like an open physical wound in that even a gentle touch on that area can be distressing. Just as serious physical wounds need attention, and neglect can make them worse, so it is with inner wounds. Trying to suppress or ignore inner pain is neither being spiritual nor strong but will prevent healing and perhaps even worsen the situation. When people suppose they are avoiding pain, and think the damage they have suffered is untreatable anyway, people are content to let traumatic memories and disturbing matters remain buried. Nevertheless, the surfacing of suppressed memories through upsetting dreams, flashbacks or whatever, can be a blessing – and might sometimes be a direct act of God – because the damage can be treated and the pain can end, provided people with these pasts stop living in denial. The surfacing of these memories long after the event makes sense and reveals divine wisdom because with the passing years these people have gained maturity, greater spiritual awareness, and sometimes greater access even to human help than when the original trauma occurred. Whether it be credit card debt, early signs of cancer or past trauma, problems are never solved by ignoring them. Putting a crisis out of your mind might give you temporary peace but the problem will only worsen and you will inevitably end up wishing you had faced it earlier. If you have a full bladder and you ignore the urge to empty it, the uncomfortable feeling will go away in a while. In time, the discomfort will return, reminding you of the need to take action. You can ignore it again and it will fade away. Keep ignoring it, however, and the pain will keep returning with increasing frequency and intensity until you either take decisive action or you embarrass yourself. Inner wounds caused by past trauma act the same way. The memory and/or associated pain will make its presence felt but you can ignore it and it will go away. Eventually, the memories and/or inner pain will come back and, if ignored, they will keep returning with increasing frequency and intensity, because ignoring a problem merely gives it time to grow worse. Nightmares, flashbacks and/or inner pain are your mind dutifully alerting you to matters you must face before they become even more serious. It is warning you that, despite your attempts to move on, you are still being crippled by past trauma. Most likely, your lack of recovery is because you have left past events languishing in the dark – where things always seems scarier – instead of devoting sufficient effort to prayerfully re-examining them in the reassuring light of God’s truth. For instance, lurking in the murky depths of your consciousness could be the fear that ugly incidents in the past indicate that God abandoned you and that he is not good and trustworthy, or that because of those unfortunate events God sees you as untrustworthy or unforgivable, or that you see yourself that way. If so, these are not merely events in the past; they are fears and lies that hold you back right now and will continue to do so until you identify the lies that haunt you and you explode them with God’s truth. You need never fear truth. The Healing Lord is the God of truth and he moves in an atmosphere of truth, not one of living in denial. Just as Jesus offers full forgiveness but we must confess our sins – admit to ourselves that we are morally damaged – so healing is available to us but we must first admit that we have been internally wounded. To deliberately live in denial is to resist the Spirit of truth. Even though he knew they needed healing, Jesus – the truth (John 14:6) – didn’t heal people without them facing reality and admitting their problem ( examples ). As much as Jesus wanted to heal them, their healing hinged on them admitting that they were sick and needed healing. Had they out of shame or through priding themselves in being macho said, “I’m fine,” they would have missed their healing. This principle applies to emotional healing as well as physical healing. There is no truth that takes God by surprise. There is nothing too hard for him or is beyond his ability to forgive. Defeatists and escapists say nothing can be done about the past, so just forget it and get on with life. The truth, however, is that much can be done about the past. We can heal from the pain of the past, we can forgive those who had hurt us in the past, we can learn from mistakes that occurred in the past, we can identify sins in our past and enjoy God’s cleansing, we can seek to undo damage that we did to people in the past. All of these are very important to God and sidestepping any of them displeases him. Yes, the apostle Paul wrote, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead . . .” (Philippians 3:13) but this is the same man who at least twice in his spoken testimonies (Acts 22:3-5; 26:9-12) and at least four times in his writings (1 Corinthians 15:9; Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6 1 Timothy 1:13-15) (and no-one knows how many other times not permanently recorded) glorifies God by recounting his sordid past. In fact, most of the Bible is devoted to recording past events – often analyzing them over and over. Should someone who has made marriage vows forget the past and commit adultery? If someone cheated you out of thousands of dollars before he become a Christian, does he honor God by “forgetting what is behind,” declaring that he “is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come” and continue to live in luxury at your expense, or should – before moving on – he do what can to rectify his past by returning your money? It was after Zacchaeus had resolved to put right his past misdeeds that Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house . . .” (Luke 19:8-9). Let’s not pervert the Holy Word of God in a shameful attempt to justify cowardice or sin. God wants us not to bury the past but to learn from the past so that it ceases to be a useless waste and what was once a stumbling block is transformed into a stepping stone to greater things. We were born again not to hide from the past but to take the hand of our victorious Lord and boldly face it. The crucified Lord who did not sidestep the ugliness of our past but in his own body bore the full consequences, wants us to partner with him to resolve and restore our past so that we can live in freedom and purity and wholeness. If you kept spending more money than you earned, every day that you refused to face the need to budget, the more serious the financial crisis would become. If you were lost and heading in the wrong direction, to push on as if everything were okay would keep taking you further and further from safety. If your car began making an unusual noise, ignoring it could turn a minor repair into a needlessly expensive, inconvenient, and even dangerous, experience. I could keep piling on example after example, but surely there is no need to risk boring you by drawing from the well of countless more examples. The stark fact of life is that living in denial is the highway to disaster. If understanding the problem is essential to finding the solution, then refusing to acknowledge the problem perpetuates the problem. If the truth sets us free, then keeping ourselves ignorant keeps us imprisoned in a self-imposed dungeon of despair. As enticing as it seems, living in denial ruins our lives by perpetuating the problem. In fact, it almost invariably intensifies the problem. Moreover, living in denial is contrary to the God of truth who loves you so passionately that he yearns not to dominate you but for you to co-operate with him in saving you from your dilemma. We long to keep ourselves in the dark about our situation, but God is light. “. . .  what fellowship can light have with darkness?” asks God in his Word (2 Corinthians 6:14). “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” asks the prophet (Amos 3:3, KJV). How can the God of truth and light partner with you in your healing and in granting you peace if you are committed to a methodology totally opposed to his ways – if he declares “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32) and you prefer to languish in slavery to lies about yourself; if he “searches all things” (1 Corinthians 2:10; Hebrews 4:13; Revelation 2:23) and you want to bury things; if he says people “loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19) and you think it is good to keep things in the dark? The emotions we don’t want to face are inside of us, whether we deny it or not. They don’t scare God. The only problem is that they often scare us . He wants you to have the courage to get really honest with yourself and with him and face your fears and your past disappointments, frustration, anger, inner pain, and so on. He is not shocked. He knows it already and he still loves and accepts you. Rather than force himself on you against your will, he honors you by restraining his longing to deliver you and tenderly waiting for you to trust him enough to invite him into the dark corners of your life and let him touch that ever so tender part of you with his healing hands. It is in the dark that shadows loom and harmless things seem terrifying. It is when we bring them into the light that sanity returns. God wants you empowered to get on with your life but this cannot happen until with Christ you face the ghosts of the past. Living in denial is a sure way to keep the pain nagging in the background and hinder healing. Distressing dreams or emotional pain can be an invaluable way of helping us face reality so that we can heal. Various things are needed to resolve emotional issues associated with past trauma. A key matter is to end the blame game. Nothing festers the wound, preventing healing, like blame, whether it be God, other people or ourselves that we blame. Our one and sure hope is to let our crucified Lord do what he longs to do by letting all the blame be placed on his innocent shoulders. There is blame – grave offences have been indeed committed – but we let all blame die with the One who died for the sins of the world; the one who was tormented so that our torment could end. An obvious key to finding peace is talking to God about the issues. Something we can foolishly overlook, however, is talking to people about the things that disturb us. Many of us think ourselves too spiritual for this. If so, we are more “spiritual” than God. For Scriptures exposing as a lie our temptation to keep things solely between God and us, see Our Need of Human Help. It would be negligent, however, not to issue this warning: when it comes to being wise, sensitive and understanding, the average person is sadly lacking. Trusting some people with your secrets is like trusting a butcher to do open heart surgery. Make a matter of serious prayer the choice of who you share with. Then, as it were, test the waters to see if he or she is both worthy and competent before launching into a full revelation of whatever concerns you. “Therefore confess your sins to each other . . . so that you may be healed” (James 5:16). Here’s a powerful saying: You are as sick as your secrets. Keep pounding heaven’s door until every personal implication is revealed. In the dark, things seem more frightening that they really are. It is when they are brought into the light that they lose their power to terrify. It is then that they cease to haunt us. Living in denial can never change reality. Nothing can change the past. But embracing the truth of our past empowers us to change our future reality and find true healing. We cannot expect God to miraculously flood a sensitive area of our lives with peace if we keep trying to run from it rather than face it head-on. God’s longing is not to anaesthetize but to heal; not to promote cowardly living in denial but courage. Readers’ Comments You are right about burying things, Grantley. I have buried a lot in my life and God has taken me step by step through a lot. Many things took a long time to surface because whenever he would touch anything that hurt I would run. This has happened so many times, even since becoming a Christian. I spent all last year in intensive counseling and ministry to get to heart issues and breaking off lies that I have believed. Healings took place and it began to open me up to freedom I hadn’t experienced in years, not to mention that God started using me again. Then when God put his finger on a situation that I revisited, I started my old thing of turning away. I pressed on, however and trusted God, and he brought about a deeper healing. Your teaching has reaffirmed that by letting God touch sensitive issues and not running away I am heading in the right direction. If and when there is more, I will not be so quick to turn away again. A woman writes: I always thought I was so very strong. I thought I had built up impenetrable fortresses. I saw myself as a female warrior. Nothing could mess with me. I was as tough and rugged as any man. I could laugh at pain. If I hit the dirt I could get up off the ground every time, saddle back up and ride on with the best of the soldiers, sword at my side. No girly princess garbage for me. I’ll rescue myself, thank you. But despite having for all this time believed myself to be fighting, I’m now seeing that I was actually running away. To have believed myself all these years to be so strong, only to discover I’ve been a coward is a hard pill to swallow. Writes someone who had suffered severe childhood abuse: This webpage was like being hit between the eyes. I had previously talked to God about my past but only now have I seen that I hadn’t told him everything. Whenever thoughts of the past would come I had always tried to shoo them away. And whenever I remembered the bad things that my dad or others had done, I would always try to excuse their actions by telling myself such things as, “They are just people. People make mistakes.” This I did out of fear that I might end up hating them. Now I see that trying to forget the past is like each day trying to torment myself more and more. Forgetting is the worst response. The real solution is to bring my rotten past to the loving Lord. Putting fresh food with rotten food will not make the rotten food edible. Instead, the rotten will slowly pollute the fresh food. Even if you throw out half of the rotten food, the half that is left will still affect the new. So it is with us. When we don’t give the Expert all of our past, we are preventing full healing. I feel so much better now that I have told Daddy God what I had within me. This is the beginning of the healing. I feel that full healing will be a long process but regardless of how long it takes, I know that it will be worth it. My desire is to live in God’s best. Another woman writes: I had a real phobia of men with blue eyes. This intense distrust did not include blue-eyed animals or women and didn’t even extend to prepubertal boys. The shade of blue I thought most menacing was a bright blue iris surrounded by a darker ring. I had no idea why I felt this way and why it would take me quite some time to warm up to blue-eyed men I’d have to work with or with whom I’d interact at church. About five years ago (I’m now in my early 50s) I was praying about this and the Holy Spirit told me he’d like to show me what caused this phobia. I immediately recoiled. “NO! If it were bad enough to cause a lifelong phobia in the first place, I’d probably have a heart attack now if I saw it!” He was gentle and did not force me but he kept nudging me for about a week to let him show me. Finally I decided my desire to be free of the fear exceeded my fear of the discomfort confronting it would cause, so I told him I was willing to have him show me. What followed turned out not to be nearly as scary as I had supposed, so please don’t be disturbed by the way it starts off: All of a sudden I was about two years old, naked, and flat on my back on a steel table in a hospital that smelled like antiseptic. (I’ve never liked that smell – it gives me chills.) I was in terrible pain in my ears and throat. I was fighting like a wildcat but being forcefully held down by a group of strangers in gowns and masks. All I could see was their eyes. Then a man with blue eyes surrounded by darker blue rings bent over me and his eyes were all I could see. (It was the doctor, but I was too young when it happened to make that distinction.) Then the vision ended. I checked with my mother, who told me that when I was 18 months old I was in danger of losing my hearing due to constant infections of my ears and tonsils. She is sure that the memory is of me in the operating room just before being put under. With the knowledge of where the phobia came from I was freed from it. Now I’m perfectly okay with blue-eyed men of any eye shade. The Holy Spirit knew how to help me, but he wouldn’t force it on me. He just gently persuaded. Because I was willing to trust him, I am now healed of a lifetime torment.

Help for People with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) Also Known as Multiple Personality Disorder (M.P.D.)     Healing and Integration of Alters (Alters are Also Known as Insiders)   Part 3   Start at Part 1    Danger   Before moving on, I must alert you to two serious dangers and hindrances to healing. One is caving into a fear of people so that you let no one close enough to help you on your healing journey. The other danger is  becoming too dependent upon a single individual . Let’s investigate that latter danger more deeply.   The first person I ever knew who had Dissociative Identity Disorder – I’ll call her Samantha – had fled a dangerous cult to live interstate with a young woman I’ll call Julie. Samantha had suffered horrific Satanic Ritual Abuse and needed virtually around-the-clock care from Julie to protect her from suicide and other dangers. So she moved in with Julie. Julie was an inexperienced but devoted and competent counselor and Samantha quickly became highly dependent upon her emotionally. The strain upon Julie was such that she ended up getting sick and had to take a compete break from helping anyone. This was so devastating to Samantha that many of her alters took it as rejection and she tragically ended up returning to her abusers. To my knowledge, virtually all the healing was lost and, years later, she is still in torment.   Another woman with D.I.D. found acceptance and the father’s love she had always craved in a kind pastor. This caused her to feel an abnormally strong bond with this pastor such that she was constantly battling feelings of jealousy regarding him, and when he needed to move to a church in another part of the country it felt like rejection to her and it proved a huge setback in her healing journey.   These are just two examples of how people with Dissociative Identity Disorder can quickly develop unhealthily powerful attachments to those who show them kindness, and what initially feels good and speeds their recovery can end up sabotaging their healing.   Until they heal, people with D.I.D. might have many casual friends but deep inside they are tortured by extreme loneliness and intense yearning for acceptance, further compounded by the belief that anyone discovering the full truth about their past would reject them. They feel haunted by dark, tormenting secrets that they keep suppressing from everyone (and even from themselves). To release that fearful pressure and isolation by sharing their secrets and find warm acceptance is such a relief that it powerfully bonds a person with whoever the secrets are shared. This, combined with the false but strong deception that virtually no one would accept them if they truly knew them, typically causes people with Dissociative Identity Disorder to feel strongly attached to, and dependent upon, a counselor or whoever they open up to.   To understand the power of the forces at work, remember that parts of the person are literally like little children desperate for a parent’s love and approval, others are like older children yearning for a best friend and still others are like teens pining for romantic love. It is not at all unusual for some to be sexually attracted to someone of the same gender as their own body. And all these different alters can believe they have found in the one counselor (or friend they have opened up to) all the love and acceptance they have been starved of all their lives. Almost overwhelmingly powerful forces combine, not only on a conscious level, but on an subconscious level.   Little children typically think their parents infallible, and starry-eyed lovers are blinded to faults in the person they idolize. People who are hurting are exceptionally sensitive. Alters can take the tiniest thing as a huge personal insult. Bring all these components together and the result is such intense emotions that if you and your alters bond exclusively to one person, then even temporarily losing access to this person can feel not just like being orphaned but being widowed, and like being betrayed by your best friend,  all at the one time .   What makes these attachments so dangerous is that no one but God can guarantee never to die or get sick or need a break. It also puts enormous pressure on the person who is the object of this dependence. Becoming so crucial to another’s healing and well-being can easily so overload a helper that he or she cracks under the demands placed on him or her. Moreover, it makes the person with Dissociative Identity Disorder dangerously vulnerable to exploitation if the one they depend so highly upon has the slightest moral weakness.   It is for very good reason that it is considered not just unwise but highly unethical for a counselor to have a romantic relationship with someone he or she is helping. Doing so is enough to get professionals deregistered because it is well established that people who are emotionally wounded are highly vulnerable and can so easily end up feeling emotionally attached to anyone offering them support. This is further exasperated by the fact that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder usually need prolonged help.   Anyone recovering from Dissociative Identity Disorder needs to be in a position where the most significant person in their recovery could at any moment die or be forced by circumstances to withdraw without it undermining much of the progress made.     An alter wrote to me, saying: My host’s husband left her alone with all her outside children to raise all by herself. He told her, “You need too much.”   We don’t want you to go away from us like he did because we need too much because that made our host cry and cry and cry and throw up until she almost died. We don't want to make that happen to her again.   I replied:   Precious Friend,   I understand your needs. They are very deep, intense and critically important. I feel for you and long to be used of God to help you have all these needs met. But although humans can facilitate, your needs are so great that it is critical for your well-being and for other people that you don’t look to other people to meet your needs. You actually need someone who is available 24/7 and who can guarantee not to burn out or die. Otherwise you are vulnerable to more heart-break – and you have already suffered far too much of that.   I will do my best, but the only safe and totally effective way to meet your needs is through Jesus and through each part of you loving, understanding and supporting every other part of you.   As you understand, it is not fair on yourself, or on any counselor, to look to a counselor as if he were a substitute husband who pledges to be with you till death and gives you priority over everyone else who needs him. I know you don’t think this is what you are asking but it is so easy to slip into this degree of dependence without realizing it.   Nor is it safe for you, or fair on any husband, for you to unconsciously make a husband into a substitute mother and father for your every alter, even though your alters desperately need it. This does not mean that your needs cannot be met but they must be met through Jesus and through you loving and supporting each part of you. My role must not be primary, but must be to help you discover how to have your needs met by Jesus and by yourself.   Since only God is immortal, infallible and unchangeable, alters need to learn as quickly as possible to keep availing themselves of human help while at the same time shifting their dependence as much as they can from humans to God. For this reason I have established a DID group, an important goal of which is that members bond to the group rather than to myself or any individual in the group. Other people are an important part of the healing process but alters are best helped by looking primarily to God and their host for nurturing, approval, parenting and so on.   The Goal of Integration   In another webpage I explain why I believe people with Dissociative Identity Disorder have superior brains. So I don’t believe the goal of integration should be to become entirely like people have never had D.I.D., any more than the goal of a genius should be to lower himself to having “normal” intelligence. (I do not have D.I.D. myself, so I say this without bias.) The goal should be for all the alters to be identified and work harmoniously as a team that dearly love and support each other, know each other’s secrets, and have full access to each other’s memories and abilities. I do, however, think it best to try to avoid having some sleep while others are awake. For all of them to sleep at the same time and be alert together will avoid unduly exhausting themselves and having to struggle through on less than full intellectual capacity.   Towards Wholeness and Integration   A child alter, who had been formed because of sexual abuse, was greatly disturbed. She who had seen herself as a little girl had come to realize that she had the body of a mature woman. This alarmed her because she believed that a sexually mature body would make her more subject to unwanted male attention. She found comfort when I explained how having an adult’s strong body, and the authority and believability that goes with it, made her less vulnerable to molesters. But she was still upset by the thought of no longer being a child.   Among the blunders I mentioned earlier was telling an alter who thought she was four years old that she was an adult. This is the alter. Before I blundered, she had already grasped that she had an adult body. To point out that she also had an adult mind had seemed a small step to me, but not to her. Until then she had seen herself as a little girl trapped in an adult’s body. She found the thought of being a full adult horrifying because she saw it as being robbed of her childhood and of her dreams. After me telling her too early and too bluntly, she had coped primarily by living in denial of what I had said.   A couple of weeks later she asked, “How old am I really?”   I looked to the Lord, anxious not to make another mistake.   I began a careful explanation of how she had come to exist as an alter and concluded with, “It’s most unfair that you’ve been dumped with all the pain and have missed out on all the good memories, but Jesus suffered so that he could take all your pain upon himself. You got left behind when the rest of you grew up but God wants to make you happy by helping you catch up so that you are reunited with the rest of you. That way, you’ll get all the good memories that you deserve – the memories that until now you have been robbed of.”   I ended by specifically answering her question. “I believe that at present you are emotionally four years old. I’m not sure what your mental age is, but you certainly seem smarter than a four year old. And you have the beautiful, strong body of a mature woman. These three things are out of step. It’s no wonder you’re confused. It would be confusing for anyone. But God wants to heal you so that all of you is the one ‘age’ with happy memories and no confusion.”   Usually, when little alters fear losing their childhood, it indicates that they have not yet received all the fun, love and nurturing that they need. If this need were left unmet, the effect of deprivation during childhood would continue and one would expect the whole person would go through life suffering from unfulfilled emotional needs. If so, the Healing Lord understands and will not let these little alters miss out on what is needed for emotional wholeness. So little alters need not fear. God will not rush things. He will not let them miss out on the nurturing they long for.   As I continued to explain to her things mentioned elsewhere in this series of webpages, peace began to settle upon this dear alter. She no longer saw herself as a separate person trapped in someone else’s body but as a vital part of one person. Now she saw herself as having been tragically disconnected from the rest of her and that union with her other parts represents true fulfillment and the end of confusion. She was not the freak that she had seen herself as, but simply someone who, through no fault of her own, had been deeply wounded emotionally, and God wanted to heal that wound. Becoming one with her host was not the frightening loss that she feared but the gaining of new memories and abilities. It was discovering that she was a key piece in a jigsaw puzzle that would never make sense without her. It was a healing, a coming home, a restoration, becoming whole.   Just a little while later, this alter began finding herself merging with two of her fellow alters whenever they met with Jesus. I asked her what it felt like to be one with the other alters. She replied that it made her feel stronger, more capable and more alive. The experience took nothing from her; it added to her. It enriched her.   It is natural for alters to mistakenly suppose that integration would mean they would cease to exist. This is far from the truth. Not only will they never cease to exist, integration means gaining more abilities – the abilities of the other alters. There is no loss. It is a win-win.   One woman with D.I.D. put it this way:   As much as I hate having this disorder I often used to worry about who I would be without it. Through your webpage I’ve learned it doesn’t have to be that way. I would be more, not less.   A woman had many alters who were excitedly discussing forming into groups of two or three and merging with each other. Some, while not committing themselves to permanency, were actually trialing it for a few days at a time. This had come about naturally, without the slightest input from any counselor. Many of them would have loved to merge with their protector alter whom they greatly admired. The protector refused, fearing that merging would result in gaining each other’s weaknesses. She worried that gaining any weakness would lower her ability to protect the alters, should that need ever arise. Moreover, she did not want to inflict her own weaknesses upon any other alter.   I told the protector that I expected that each would gain the other’s strengths and that weaknesses would disappear, unless all the alters she merged with had the same weakness. At my suggestion she asked God about it. He always comes up with brilliant insights. He replied that it would be best to wait a little while before merging with any other alter and that she should focus first on merging with God. This alter was already a very committed Christian but at times was a little tentative in her relationship with God, as is typical of someone whose trust has been seriously violated by humans. Of course, God’s response is very scriptural. For example:   1 Corinthians 6:16-17   . . . For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.   The alter concluded that by merging with the perfect Lord, her own weaknesses would cease to be an issue.   Bursting Out of Confinement   In Heidelberg Zoo, Germany, a bear was confined in a small cage for years. Every day it would continually pace up and down as far as the cage would permit – twelve paces up and twelve paces back. Finally, the bear was released in a large new enclosure, but to everyone’s dismay, all it would do was walk back and forth, twelve paces up, twelve paces back.   Alters are like that. It’s not that an alter does not have the skills or memories or emotional ownership of certain events that a fellow alter has. It is simply that such alters are living in denial, or mistakenly think that they are more limited than they really are. They can access all the memories and skills of the full person but they believe themselves incapable of going beyond the narrow confines of who they think they are. They usually see themselves as having no existence before a certain age, nor beyond a certain age. They need to be freed from the confines that this self-image imposes on them.   As alters begin to heal, they will occasionally draw upon memories or skills outside of the age they imagine they are limited to. For example, an alter who thinks she is a child might display maturity or vocabulary or a skill that the person never had at that age. Or an alter might speak of an event that occurred before he was formed as if he personally experienced it. This often happens so naturally that alters are unaware that they are doing it. They can be greatly helped if, when you notice it happening, you gently draw to their attention that what they are saying or doing indicates that they truly are the full person that you have been telling them they are.   Since alters exist in an attempt to protect other parts of the person from at least some of the trauma of deeply disturbing experiences, they retain the deepest emotional reaction to experiences. Not surprisingly, they also sometimes seek to protect the rest of the person by keeping unpleasant information to themselves. Although these secrets seemed horrific when the alter formed, the host has since matured physically and probably spiritually, or circumstances may have greatly changed. For any of these reasons, the secrets are likely to be less upsetting to the host than the alter supposes. It is also not uncommon for an alter to be trying desperately to keep a secret without realizing that the host already knows about it.   Metaphorically speaking, it was as though artificial roadblocks had been set up in her host’s brain dividing the real person into several alters. Neural pathways from each alter to the thoughts, memories, viewpoints and so on of the rest of the person are all in place and full access can easily be established once each blockage is removed. As an alter stops holding on to secrets and looks to God for healing, the blockage slowly dissolves, thus allowing the alter, simply by thinking, to access memories and skills that the alter hadn’t known he/she had. As this begins to happen, the alter becomes increasingly like the whole person, with just a slightly different perspective unique to that alter.   Once confidence is gained and an alter reveals his/her secrets to the rest of the person, a significant reason for the alter to exist as a separate entity vanishes. To unite with other alters the alter must also like those alters and (if the alters are older) not be afraid of growing up or losing his/her individuality. The alter is then likely to merge with one or more other alters and the process continue until all the alters have integrated into one person with the full power of all the memories and skills and perspectives of each alter combined. The order in which merging takes place might surprise. For instance, a teenage alter might happen to have more in common with one in its thirties than one in its twenties and so the teenage alter could merge with the thirties alter, while the alter in its twenties temporarily continues to remain separate. Moreover, it is often a case that opposites attract. Alters with a particular weakness will often team up with those who can compensate. A timid alter might team up with a courageous one; an alter lacking a particular intellectual skill might team up with one that has that skill, and so on.   I should point out, however, that it is not uncommon for an alter to remain silent for a while and for the host to misinterpret this silence as indicating that the alter has merged with another.   Helpful Points in Healing   Since most people have more than one alter, each alter needs an individual name to help you identify which alter you are speaking with. Sometimes alters choose for themselves demeaning names, such as Shame or Reject. I never use such names because doing so reinforces a lie they have believed about themselves. In fact, if they let you, consider using an opposite name such as Honor or Beloved. Sometimes alters choose normal but diverse names. Three alters of the one person might be named Jack, Bill and Brian. It might slightly aid their sense of unity, however, if they could be referred to by the age that they formed. For example, if the host’s name is Jack, they might be called three-year-old Jack, six-year-old Jack and twelve-year-old Jack. On the other hand, even referring to them by age could be slightly negative by helping them feel locked into that age. One woman told me the Lord had instructed her to start using a hyphenated name for each alter, with her birth name appearing first. For example, if her birth name had been Mary and she had alters called Little-One, Precious and Mother, their names became Mary-Little-One, Mary-Precious and Mary-Mother. I see God’s wisdom in this as it reinforces to each alter that she is part of one person. A name can have such a powerful impact upon a person that, in the Bible, people’s names were sometimes chosen by God. I’ve seen alters profoundly helped by being given a significant, positive name. So choice of names is worthy of prayer.   We all love testimonies of people who, by becoming Christians, undergo dramatic transformations of beliefs and behavior. We have explained, however, that until they are helped, alters are trapped in a time warp, and if the time in which they are trapped is before their host’s conversion, those alters will, as one would expect, be like non-Christians and have not yet experienced any of the spiritual transformations that the host enjoyed later in life. This situation will continue until the alters are specifically taught the gospel message, yield to it, and are trained up in the ways of the Lord. So it is not unusual for a Christian to have an alter that hates God or has other habits or views that disgust the Christian part of the person.   It is hardly surprising that when alters first surface after feeling despised and rejected for years, they are often bitter and unpleasant to talk to, just as almost anyone would be after suffering a tragedy and then cruelly treated, rejected and kept in solitary confinement, year after year. Please don’t add to their torment by letting their reaction upset you. Show them kindness and acceptance and minister the love of Christ to them.   Alters need to be loved and prayed for and coaxed into the kingdom of God. They need to be taught Christian principles that might now seem so basic to hosts that they have forgotten that they had ever needed to be taught them. Just like anyone else who has had little exposure to Christian teaching, most alters must be taught such basics as the need to forgive those who have hurt them, to renounce sins and any occult links and, once they have yielded to Christ, to learn the authority that they have in him. Each of these is a huge step, so be gentle and patient.   If an alter’s host has already surrendered to Christ, I find it easy to have faith for the alter to likewise yield, but keep remembering that alters are deeply hurting and so deserve great tenderness. Usually the trauma they suffered involved having their trust violated. So trusting anyone – God included – is highly challenging, possibly even terrifying, for them. Trust takes time to develop.   Not only are alters deeply hurting, they almost expect to be rejected and easily misinterpret even harmless remarks as rejection. They might act stony hard but it is simply an attempt to steel themselves against the pain of rejection. Deep down they crave unconditional love and acceptance. If they begin to feel they can find this in you, they will be keen to please, and any trouble they cause will not be due to not wanting to please you, although they might deliberately test you to see if you would reject them, as they fear. So discipline would not increase their motivation. I urge against speaking sternly to alters –even to very annoying ones. Don’t tell them off like naughty children. Each alter needs and deserves deep respect and lots of unconditional love and patience and gentle persuasion.   Being stern with an alter is likely to drive the alter into hiding. If that seems like peace to you, it is a false peace. If you have alters, they are an inseparable part of you. It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that to hurt a part of you is to hurt yourself, and to not coax an alter into the open where he/she can heal, is to cripple yourself.   You’ll be astounded at how a few days of compassion and gently explaining the gospel will transform a nasty, God-hating, sin-loving alter into a delightful, God-loving friend and ally who is keen to live a life of purity and to please you and other alters.   Sometimes, when you have been ministering for weeks to a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder and yet another alter speaks to you for the first time, the alter has heard much of what you have told other alters. Often, however, the alter has not heard and you have to repeat it all over again to the new alter. This can sometimes be tiresome for the person helping, but it must be done. Often the host and other alters can help the new alter but I have frequently underrated how much I’m still needed to repeat what I have already told the person’s other alters.   Since each alter will behave rather like a normal traumatized person of that age and gender, the more skilled you are at emotionally supporting people, the better you will be at helping alters. For some practical tips in how to emotionally support people who are hurting, see the link at the end of this page, titled How to Comfort the Hurting.   It is both very important and healing to parent child alters as you would tenderly parent a normal, deeply hurting, fearful child. This can be particularly challenging if you are inexperienced with children, but most new parents start off inexperienced, too. Buy each young alter his/her own toys. Play them Christian children’s music. Hug them, praise them, tell them you love them. Sometimes even adult alters that seem very tough can desperately need such expressions of parental love and approval. For the sake of baby alters, you might even need to wear diapers, use a pacifier, and drink formula milk from a bottle. An adult man found there were often times when, if he did not do this, he would get so stressed as to fall into sin. But he found using baby items so humiliating that he had to learn over and over just how critical it was for his healing and his own peace.   Listen long and hard to each alter. Teach, guide, play with, empathize with and even joke with the alter. If a host finds times for certain alters to manifest themselves freely, they will be more settled at times when the host particularly wants them to be quiet.   It is important to know that God is eager to take alters into his temporary, intensely personal care. It is not unusual for the alters of Christians to enjoy times in heaven playing with God or receiving personal instruction or comfort from him. One child alter often played before the throne of God with several other, unrelated child alters, some of whom spoke languages that were foreign to her. One of their favorite games was playing with what seemed to be a harmless ball of fire. An alter I know once found herself in what seemed like a pleasant and private heavenly hospital ward in which Jesus sat on her bed and personally comforted her. Not surprisingly, such experiences are deeply healing. Encourage alters to feel loved of God and safe with him and to spend much time with him.   Wrote one alter in a written prayer:   We hide in you. You have a secret place for alters and we know it is a safe place. . . . Daddy, thank you for loving and protecting alters. We would be in deep trouble without you, but we are with you and you love us.   It is not uncommon for a host to feel overwhelmed by the incessant demands of several needy alters. Such a person is able to enjoy respite by handing one or more of the alters over to God for a while.   With the help of her host, one of Alice’s younger alters wrote the following to one of Jake’s younger alters about the games God plays with her. Do not regard these games as trivial. Imagine how healing and bonding to God such experiences would be to a traumatized little girl who is never allowed to play, and for whom touch was usually painful, sexual, or both.   God plays lots of games. My favorite is “Tickles”. I love it when he grabs me and spins me around, smiling and laughing. Then he gently tickles me and kisses my tummy. I squeal in delight.   He dances with me too. I love to spin around in his arms and I feel so safe. We sing a lot together. I love to sing.   We play hide and seek. He pretends he doesn’t see me and I pounce into his lap. Then he grabs me and cuddles with me. Or I call him and he surprises me with where he is. Sometimes he is behind me and that isn’t fair ’cos I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. He clowns around and we giggle and giggle.   On another occasion, Alice typed as God spoke to her little alter. Here’s part of what he said:   Sweetie, you are my delight. I love alters. They are special people with special needs. When the world shuts them up I have a place in my heart for them. I love you and the times we play together are more than precious to me.   The Lord is far better at understanding and helping alters – and anyone else for that matter – than we are. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding it: people (alters included) need people. One host was so frustrated with his child alters that he sent them all off to God, hoping never to see them again. I understand his reaction. It was a huge trial for him. Some of the alters were not toilet trained. One wanted a pacifier and formula milk and couldn’t even speak. Imagine a grown man acting that way. In fact, his wife had left him because of it. The Lord made it clear to him, however, that, respite breaks and special healing sessions aside, the man must care for his own alters. Seeing the wisdom of what God had told him, I pointed out to the frustrated host that he would remain fractured – and hence below his full, God-given potential – while his alters were not with him. God can heal in amazing ways but this man needed to bond with his alters, and they with him, for him to find true wholeness. Like any other human bonding process, spending considerable time with each other is essential.   Human Help   There is much that people can do to help and comfort their own alters. In fact, when coupled with continually seeking divine help, I used to think that healing oneself should be the norm. However, an alter I had helped wrote the following to a man who had alters, and sent me a copy:   Alters are lonely people. It is so much better not to suffer alone. I needed to talk to someone outside myself, not merely with the host I split from. I needed a safe place to say some very personal stuff and talk graphically about the things that hurt me. I needed to trust someone and to know that I could be accepted for who I am. For me, Grantley was that someone. This has helped me so much and I am grateful both to God and Grantley for their help.   Before reading this I had been vaguely aware of the value of alters talking to people other than those who share their own body. Now that I have stopped to consider it, however, the importance is obvious. Someone in solitary confinement can, of course, talk to himself and God, and doing so would be invaluable. Nevertheless, anyone in this situation will develop a desperate need to talk to other humans.   This same alter explained why she would never reveal herself to a professional counselor. An alter’s most pressing need is for a friend, not a clinical healer or anyone paid to spend time with the alter. If you felt rejected and painfully lonely, would you pay someone by the hour to listen to you? Many of us would find that so hollow and humiliating that we would prefer to remain lonely! This alter believes she is typical of all alters in not wanting someone who, with an air of superiority, looks at her as a patient or a case study. She feels the same way about any do-gooder who might treat her as an object of pity or someone to be helped, rather than as a valued friend. An alter’s self-esteem is typically so low that it could barely endure such a put down. Alters need and deserve a genuine friend – someone who not only gives a listening ear and shares insights but who values their friendship. And this is not hard to do. I’m not surprised that someone who has helped large numbers of people with Dissociative Identity Disorder said he has yet to find an alter he didn’t like. Of course, many need to be relieved of their pain before they become likeable.   Moreover, I have since discovered an alter who would let both a friend and me help him but refused to accept his host’s help. The host had previously despised and rebuked him for years, sometimes regarding the alter as his sinful “flesh” and sometimes as a demon. Even though the host had now completely changed his attitude, the alter continued to resent him for his past behavior, thus limiting the host’s ability to help the alter. I was eventually able to help the alter forgive his host, but it took a while.   Someone else wrote to me frustrated that her alters would reveal their secrets to me before ever telling her. I explained that this is because they regard me as more expendable than her. If I were to reject an alter (which I would never do), the alter would be less devastated than if it were her who rejected the alter. So her alters often prefer to test my reaction before taking the ultimate risk of letting her know their secrets. Even if they knew her so well as to feel secure in her love and ongoing approval, however, there is another hurdle: they have devoted their entire existence to keeping secrets from her to protect her from distress and her alters look to me for a sign as to whether she could cope from knowing their secrets.   Another practical difficulty in someone trying to cure themselves without the support of anyone else is that when alters first surface their deep emotional pain tends to overwhelm the rest of the person, making it very hard for the person to think with sufficient clarity to effectively minister to his or her new alter.   I mentioned earlier in this series of webpages my friend with D.I.D. who chose a psychologist as a prayer partner. My friend told him that he could not afford a counselor. The psychologist replied, “Counseling is sometimes overrated. God is God. Jesus does the healing and it is his choice as to how he heals.”   The difficulty in relying solely on a friend for help, however, is that the friend would need to be a very special person, led of the Spirit and endowed with wisdom. For at least some basic preparation, both the friend and the person with the alters should, in addition to studying these webpages, read those on the link at the end of this page, titled How to Comfort the Hurting.   Whoever alters choose to confide in, it will need to be someone the alters (not just the host) feel relaxed with. I know a host who thinks a certain woman is wonderful but one of her alters cannot tolerate her because the woman reminds her of someone who deeply offended her. It is important that the chosen person believes both in the host and in alters, and is trustworthy, gentle, patient, faithful, unshockable and nonjudgmental. Before sharing with anyone anything about your alters, question them about their understanding and attitudes concerning both demons and alters. Ideally, the person should not only believe in alters but also in demons, and preferably have had experience in casting out demons and also in differentiating between alters and demons. An alter may feel more trusting of one gender than the other. As the alter heals, however, exposure to an honorable person of the other gender could be healing.   It can also be very powerful (sometimes it’s the ultimate) for an alter to minister to someone else’s alter. Being alters, they can really identify with each other and gain acceptance. The ministering alter must, of course, be a strong Christian and able to withstand any insults or seduction that the other alter might try. Such contact should be supervised.   Alters – even ones formed as adults – can be so desperate for an approving mother or father that they would love the counselor or friend to become a substitute mother or father. It ends up being far safer and more healing, however, if Jesus and an alter or the host take on the parenting roles. That way there is availability 24/7 without any danger of abandonment due to the substitute parent burning out or leaving. Moreover, the healing advantages are obvious: the more deeply bonded the person is with Jesus and with every part of himself/herself, the better.   One of Jake’s alters used to call himself “Reject.” Despite him not being happy with his new name, we renamed him Beloved. In the following, he is replying to an e-mail from one of Alices’ alters who, coincidentally, also used to call herself “Reject”. It highlights several things about alters and the powerful way God ministers to them.   I’m not hitting any of the other alters anymore.   For the last few days I went to porn thinking that it would help me, but Terry [one of the younger brother alters he used to hit] keeps singing praise to God and I can hear him inside. When I go to masturbate he starts crying and praying and I can’t continue. I want to be like Terry.   I told Jesus to be Lord of my sexuality today and asked him to be my Lord also. Jesus told me, “Well done!”   Terry says that when I do bad things it hurts him, too. He just keeps praying for me and doesn’t stop. He is afraid of me. I don’t want him to be afraid of me. I don’t hate him anymore. He just loves too much. I am afraid to be loved.   Thank you for telling me that I am wanted. No one ever wanted me. Thank you for wanting me to live.   Jesus wants me. I am just scared at times of him. He has not hurt me, though. He took me to heaven with him for a little bit. He does love me. I am still confused sometimes, though.   I am Beloved of God. I don’t want to be Rejected ever again.   When you sent the e-mail about Jesus blowing his love on me, I felt it blow over my spirit. I don’t really understand that, but he does love me.     By the way, it is important for anyone with D. I. D. who has the tiniest attraction to porn to place a porn filter on all Internet access. You cannot expect currently unknown alters to have the degree of self-control that you have, nor can you expect little alters to be able to tolerate what you can tolerate. Disregarding this can cause significant setbacks in one’s healing. A link at the end of this page provides a list of porn filters.   A three-year old child who has been traumatized can be seriously triggered by television programs rated for general viewing. Something as innocuous as falling asleep in front of a T.V. can have most unpleasant consequences. When the host is asleep, little alters are often more active, not less, and the host is unable to monitor what is seen.   Hindrances to Integration   Total  healing and  full  integration might take years but the good news is that throughout your healing journey you will enjoy the benefits of continual improvement. Like a young athlete who will become world champion, you will keep getting better and better even though you cannot expect to reach your peak in just a few months.   The first step towards full integration is for alters to reveal themselves. By reading these webpages you have come to understand that each alter needs to feel safe enough to do this and that upon first surfacing, each alter usually has so much pain – and sometimes bad habits – that the host and already-surfaced alters are reluctant for a new alter to manifest himself/herself. So the surfacing of alters is usually a slow, drawn-out process and yet even then the person usually feels that it is happening too quickly. There are various factors affecting how long it takes for all alters to be identified. An obvious factor is how many alters a person has. People who have suffered long term Satanic Ritual Abuse could have over a hundred.   Even with daily counseling and only thirty alters who get on well with each other, it is likely to take at least a year – probably much longer – for all alters to be identified. Moreover, I know of no way of ascertaining that every alter has revealed himself/herself. Often there are alters that no other alter is aware of, and even if an alter knows, he or she might feel obligated not to reveal another alter’s existence without that alter’s permission. Thankfully, invaluable moves towards integration will begin long before all alters have appeared. As alters mature, they will become increasing alike and various alters will team up.   Beyond the mere surfacing of alters, full integration is also slow. What particularly makes integration a drawn out process is that each alter must want it. Just because certain alters have been conversing with you for months and have undergone significant healing does not mean that they do not have further serious issues that need to be worked through before they are ready to integrate. There are so many potential obstacles to an alter wanting integration. Let’s list some of them.   *  An unwillingness to accept present-day reality   The person’s real gender, actual age or current marital status are examples of reality that an alter might not be ready to accept. Desperately wanting to keep living in denial would make such an alter recoil from uniting with an alter who accepts reality.   *  An unwillingness to accept truths known to another alter   An alter might, for example, be so desperate to love and respect a certain person (a parent, perhaps) that it refuses to believe another alter’s experiences that shatter the myth – perhaps by proving that the person was an abuser. For such an alter, integration would involve gaining memories that the alter refuses to accept. So the alter will remain separate until it is willing to accept this.   *  Wanting to monopolize access to a certain skill   An alter’s concern that she might end up ignored or undervalued by other alters could move the alter to keep other alters dependent upon her by monopolizing access to a certain skill or useful memories she has. Integration involves each alter having full access to all memories and skills, and until she feels more secure, such an alter will refuse to let this happen.   *  Fear that integration means ceasing to exist   I have explained earlier in this series of webpages the benefits to alters of integration.   *  Maintaining a different sleep schedule from the other alters   An alter might prefer to avoid stress by sleeping at times when the rest of the person is interacting with people. Young alters need to play and might be given no opportunity to do so except when everyone else is asleep. Another reason for a different sleep schedule might be that an alter feels it is safest for at least one alter to be on guard at all times against any possible attack. The result is working in shifts with alters, rather than seeking to work in unison.   *  Going into hiding whenever things get difficult   Leaving it to other alters when things get tough will obviously hinder integration.   *  Not wanting to share another alter’s beliefs or hopes   For example, cultivating hopes and dreams might be important for one alter but might appal another who is terrified of the pain of dashed hopes.   *  Falsely blaming an alter for past traumas   One alter, for example, might believe that another acted inappropriately and so blame the alter for what happened. Such ill-feeling will block integration.   *  Resentment over genuine offenses   An alter might in the past have “hit” or insulted another alter or have wished an alter were dead. Unless alters forgive each other, they will not merge.     *  Intolerance of immaturity   This can take many forms. For example, when allowed to manifest herself, an alter formed as a baby might need diapers or want to be bottle fed. Older alters could strongly resent this. Or older alters might want to watch movies that would terrify children, or do other things inappropriate for children and hence upset their own young alters. This will hinder healing and so block the path to integration.   *  Moral objections   An alter might swear, use porn, smoke or do something else that another alter strongly objects to on moral grounds. Until resolved, this will divide alters.   *  Differing tastes   There might be serious disputes over choice of food, clothing, music, use of money, and so on.   *  A significant person in the alter’s life might not want integration   Alters might resist integration because they fear that a counselor or loved one might like them less after integration. Or the loved one might be consciously sabotaging integration because he or she prefers to relate to someone with alters. The loved one might, for example, be so keen to have children that he or she encourages alters who think they are children to continue to be childish.   Alice, whose alters are nearing full integration, writes:   One of my alters set some ground rules that we all follow:   1.     Do not take out your hurt on other alters. They are hurting too.   2.     Do not use force on another alter. Each of us knows what it is to be manipulated and treated roughly, so we do not perpetuate this by treating others badly.     3.     Do not make fun of another alter. We all know how hard it is to communicate and how confusing it is when alters first surface. We have all been trapped by isolation and this expresses itself in many forms. Let each alter come to terms with what she is experiencing and to communicate it as best as she can.   4.     Above all, never betray an alter. Anything confided to you, including the mere existence of an alter, is a sacred trust that must not be revealed to anyone without the alter’s full permission.     These rules have helped alters become friends. It starts from the moment any of us become aware of an alter who is new to us. Remembering how lonely and confused we once were, we immediately offer her our friendship and remain faithful and kind to her, no matter how unpleasant she might initially seem. If she hurts us in any way, we refuse to take it personally but compassionately realize it is because she is delirious with pain. We must love as Christ loves, in full faith that such courageous love will slowly melt the heart of a bitter, angry alter; transforming her into a beautiful and precious friend. And on the way to this transformation we teach her our ground rules.   Maintaining those ground rules has made us dangerous to hell. United, we fight together as an army against everything that would seek to bring us down. We can read each other’s minds and function as one, switching around to let some rest or to let each other’s strengths be used to achieve what is needed. The most critical thing, however, is to be submitted to God in all of this.   When Alters Seem to Have Disappeared or Died   It is common for alters to suddenly “vanish,” especially after something triggering occurs. In extreme cases, other alters – and even the missing alter – can mistakenly believe the alter has died. I’ll say a little more about “dead” alters soon but this little section applies to all alters who have gone missing.   Even when it is known not to be serious, losing contact with an alter can be quite disconcerting. You might even suddenly find yourself without knowledge or abilities needed to perform key tasks at work or elsewhere.   No one can say with certainty when these alters will return but they are sure to do so eventually. Here are some hints that might speed their return:   *  If an alter who has gone AWOL, has a favorite toy or doll or activity, hold the doll, play the game, listen to the alter’s favorite music, etc. That can help the alter feel safe and he or she might come out enough for you to talk with the alter, allowing you the opportunity to provide needed reassurance, an update on what has happened since the alter withdrew, etc.   *  Even if you are not sure the alter is listening, tell the alter something encouraging several times throughout the day such as, “It is safe now” (if that is true), “I need you,” “I’d love to speak with you,” etc.   *  Another way is to ask alters who are out to see if they can locate the silent alter and pass on a message.   *  It is good to prepare ahead of time for such emergencies by creating in your imagination a safe place for alters to retreat to when they feel the need to withdraw. This safe place can have a locked door, or whatever, but ensure it has a speaker phone or some means of getting a message through.   Dead Alters   Sometimes alters will be convinced that an alter that was once in their system has died. Often they will be saddened by this and they might even blame themselves for it. The supposed death might have happened years ago and it might have seemed like suicide and/or be precipitated by bad treatment from other alters.   What actually happened is that the alter thought to have died went into deep hiding and has not been seen since. If an alter seeks God about the fate of the missing alter it will often be revealed that the alter has been with God ever since the disappearance and is so content that the alter has no desire to return to the stresses of earthly life.   This might sound cozy but the practical reality is that some of the person’s intellectual capacity (quite possibly including a special talent) and the alter’s special experiences with God are rendered inaccessible and effectively lost for as long as that alter remains with God (or otherwise hidden).   So despite it meaning that the alter must re-enter the harsh realities of everyday living, the alter’s return is very much in the interest of the rest of the person and of that person achieving the most for God on earth. It is therefore advisable to entice the alter back. Prayer for this will help, as well as passing on messages that the alter is loved and that earthly life is now better than when the alter left. Any alter who treated this alter badly should also apologize.   Feeling Excessive Guilt For Loved Ones   Many alters have spent almost their entire existence selflessly relieving the distress of other parts of them by bearing the distress themselves. They take upon themselves unpleasant memories and/or associated negative emotions – such as guilt, shame, blame, regret, sorrow, depression, loneliness, fear, worry, anxiety, anger, self-loathing and feelings of inferiority. This they do to enable other parts, especially the host, to focus on necessary tasks, such as study or work, without the crippling distraction of all these distressing feelings and concerns. Their efforts sometimes even work for physical pain and tiredness. This unique type of help ends up being almost an automatic response, an addiction, and a way of life. Some even see it as their sole reason for existence. This carries over to other relationships so that when they suppose a loved one – sometimes even an animal – in the external world is suffering, they slip so easily – almost unconsciously – into attempting to relieve the loved one’s suffering by suffering on that person’s behalf.   None of us can know exactly what a person is feeling. If someone has an open wound, the slightest touch could send him reeling in pain, whereas for other people the same touch might not hurt at all. So alters, having suffered deeply themselves and often having inner wounds that are not yet healed, typically assume that loved ones in the outside world are more sensitive and hurting more than they actually are. This, combined with the expectation that suffering on someone’s behalf will relieve that person’s distress, drives them even more to want to suffer for the loved one. Moreover, there are several factors causing alters and child abuse survivors to have a highly exaggerated sense of responsibility for the welfare of others.   All the factors cited above and in the link combine to make it exceedingly difficult for alters to stop their habit of acting like an alter to people in the outside world. Despite the best intentions, however, suffering on behalf of someone who does not share one’s body and brain cannot ease that person’s distress. So alters who attempt to help in this way are left feeling such failures and so devastatingly guilty that it could even lead to self-harm.   Even without Dissociative Identity Disorder, dwelling on guesses about what a loved one might be suffering often ends in needless worry and attempts at empathy that overshoot the mark. Since people with D.I.D. are even more susceptible to this torturously futile habit, it is helpful for them to be alert to the danger and try to stop themselves or their fellow alters whenever they notice thoughts drifting towards negative guesses as to what their loved ones are feeling. Alters can benefit from continual gentle reminders that their guesses are likely to be wrong and that the more they think about a loved one’s “suffering” the more likely they are to slip into feeling within themselves the very things they mistakenly suppose their loved one is feeling. Help alters understand that trying to ease someone’s pain by bearing it for the person can never work with people in the outside world and that no rational person would expect them to even try. Alters need repeated reassurance that no-one other than Jesus can be anyone else’s alter. Assure them that God has great plans for them and a real purpose, even though it does not include bearing other people’s pain and distress.   Spiritual Blockages to Healing   No one in the universe comes close to Jesus in being able to set us free, empower us and heal us. If, however, any part of us is scared of Jesus or suspects he is harsh or frowns on us then, instead of snuggling into him and enjoying to the maximum his companionship and encouragement and wisdom, we will find ourselves instinctively staying somewhat aloof from him. This aloofness will rob us of so much warmth and comfort and spiritual power and access to divine wisdom and healing we would otherwise tap into. To break this artificial barrier created by not realizing how safe, trustworthy and kind Jesus is, every alter needs to read  How Much does God Love Me? Receiving a Personal Revelation of God’s Love for You  and all the links there. And to remove misguided fears that God might disapprove of them, they each need to read  Forgiving Yourself  and then keep following the first link at the end of the text on each page. They also need to make a declaration like the following. I suggest each of them study it and then read it out loud:   The real Jesus Christ is pure, holy, safe and trustworthy, and I declare to be a lying impostor anyone claiming to be Jesus who would ever want to relate sexually to anyone or in any way harm me. The real Jesus is good and perfect, the only eternal Son of God, through whom and for whom all things were made. He is the Innocent One who by dying on the cross took upon himself the full punishment everyone’s sin deserves so that through faith in him I can now be rescued from all evil spiritual powers and granted his innocence and become spiritually one with the Holy Lord, destined to rule with King Jesus on God’s throne forever.   Having broken the power of all evil, Jesus rose triumphant from the dead and returned to heaven where he rules until the end of the age when he will fully execute his victory on the cross by destroying all evil. By virtue of who he is as the eternal Lord and through his victory on the cross he is far more powerful that the combined forces of every other power in the physical and spiritual universe.   I proudly declare that through faith in Jesus dying on the cross to secure forgiveness for my every sin, I belong to him and because he is utterly unselfish, good, kind, wise and trustworthy I want to forever obey him in everything he asks me to do. Because I belong to the Lord Jesus Christ and he is far stronger than anything that would seek to harm me or my loved ones, I call upon him for total protection against any threats, curses or negative consequences associated with terminating every agreement I have ever made that God wants me to break and every tie with people or spiritual beings that God wants me to end.   I hereby permanently break any commitment, promise or agreement I have knowingly or unknowingly made with Lucifer (Satan or the devil) or with any other spiritual being that is not in total submission to the Lord Jesus Christ, the holy Son of God and rightful Judge of every being that exists. If I have made to anyone else any promises that are not in accordance with God’s holy will for my life, I likewise break them all.   I also permanently refuse to accept any so-called benefit associated with an agreement I previously made that does not have God’s approval and, instead, I claim all the blessings and protection that are mine because of Jesus. Through Jesus I am free and through my spiritual oneness with him I exercise his authority to resist all evil and compel it to leave me.   For further help in exercising the authority Jesus has given you over evil, see  Susan has a Secret  (especially good for children and young alters) and  Spiritual Warfare: Turning Spiritual Attack into Victory .   Challenges for those with Dissociative Identity Disorder   Eight things anyone with Dissociative Identity Disorder needs constant reassurance about:   *  Even though the symptoms are disconcerting, you are not going insane.   *  Like the rest of humanity, alters can have demons but alters themselves are not demons, even though they can display anti-Christian beliefs and behavior and some alters can believe they are the opposite sex.   *  When an alter first reveals himself/herself, unwanted feelings and habits are likely to surface within you that you had thought you had mastered. It can be deeply disturbing both to you and to the other alters. Not surprisingly, it will feel to you as if you are getting worse instead of better. Nevertheless, although it may take a while, each alter will heal and the appearance of a previously unknown alter is a significant step towards peace, joy and fulfillment like you have never before enjoyed.   *  We have noted that when one alter finds acceptance, another is likely to think it could be safe enough to make an appearance, and then another alter could be emboldened to appear, and then another . . . So even when a person is experiencing significant healing he/she is seldom able to bask in the benefits before being hit by another challenge. Keep reminding yourself of the progress made and remember that if things were slower, your full healing would be delayed.   *  Except for sinning, let your alters express themselves as much as possible when alone or with someone who understands alters. This is vital for your healing and should be allowed even to the extent of letting them embarrass you or even use offensive language if they feel the need to express their pain or hostility.   *  Respect alters. Don’t betray their confidence, make decisions without consulting them, and so on. Disregarding this – even accidentally – is likely to create an enemy within, which will, to say the least, be unpleasant and delay your healing.   Writes one of Alice’s alters to one of Jake’s alters, trying to smooth over one such incident:   Please don’t hate Jake. He is hurting and confused, just as you and I are.   *  Seek to change alters, not by force or suppression, but by the healing power of ending the alters’ feeling of isolation and rejection, and tenderly ministering the love of Christ and the power of the Gospel to them. Coax and pray them into the realization that God is always forgiving, never angry or judgmental, towards anyone who lets God into his/her heart. Keep reassuring them that God is on their side and is gentle, understanding and wants to bring comfort and take their pain from them.   Continues Alice’s alter in her e-mail to one of Jake’s alters:   We aren’t going to get anywhere if God doesn’t help us. He wants to. It is time for us both to yield to God. You can go to God just as you are with all your pain, confusion and frustration. He will sort out all those things that leave us so confused.   *  Despite initial distress, the surfacing of a new alter will not only ultimately lead to the reduction of inner pain, it can mean access to exciting abilities that will delight and/or empower you. It is not only older alters who can prove to be of immense importance. For example, one young alter might have far better short-term memory than the host and other alters. Locked within another young alter might be a huge reserve of creativity, causing a person to soar to heights of creativity beyond anything the person could otherwise achieve. Yet another little alter might have spent years being personally nurtured by God and have amazing spiritual insight and intimacy with God.   If you have alters, those you least expect to have special ability could end up making invaluable contributions to your well-being. Due to abusive toilet training and other traumas, one woman used to have enormous difficulty going to the bathroom. Every alter seemed to have yet another reason for this being traumatic, and delaying relieving herself would plunge her into crippling pain. Her last alter to surface was formed at the age of six. As is usual for anyone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, the woman was unhappy about discovering yet another alter. She had already had to endure the flashbacks and pain of twenty-eight other alters. After a while, however, she discovered that this alter could use the bathroom painlessly. The other alters then learnt to rely on this alter when needing to relieve themselves, thus freeing them from pain and embarrassing accidents that had plagued them all their life. For a surprising array of reasons, you have cause to welcome the surfacing of alters, no matter how much discomfort they initially bring.   *  You cannot heal alone. You need people. Do all you can, however, not to put all your dependence upon just one human. Try your hardest to spread this among several people and keep working towards your highest attachment – and that of your alters – being with God, and that the host and other alters are seen as the primary human providers of comfort, wisdom and support.   Final Remarks   In this article I have drawn almost solely upon my personal experience in helping survivors of child abuse. There are sure to be people better than me in understanding and treating Dissociative Identity Disorder. The one infallible expert, however, is the Lord Jesus Christ, before whom I gladly trash any claim to qualifications or experience. Put no trust in me, but you can truly trust him.

Susan has a Secret     A Christian Children’s Story Especially Helpful for Sexually Abused Children     Powerful Christian Help for Child Alters Of Dissociative Identity Disorder Sufferers   Note:  Adults Find this Helpful, Too   Susan has a secret. It makes her feel very, very bad and dirty. Something happened that makes her think she is the naughtiest girl in the whole world. She is too scared to let anyone know. It makes her so sad and so very lonely.   Susan would like to be an octopus. Then she would have eight arms with which to hug. Mommy’s hugs make her feel safe and warm and special. She needs so many but gets so few. Too often she feels cold and lonely and unsafe.   Octopuses can do something amazing. When they want to hide from someone they squirt black ink into the water as they swim. Then no one can find them. There is someone Susan wishes she could hide from. And that person does things to her because she had a human body. Susan wishes God had made her an octopus because octopuses don’t have those body parts.   Susan is pretty. Even the angels in heaven know it, but no one has ever told Susan. In fact, people have said things that make her think she isn’t pretty. She has not yet discovered that God himself thinks she is beautiful.   Susan would love to have God as a friend. He would keep her secret and he would believe her and be kind to her. They could play together and be best friends. But Susan thinks God only likes good kids and she is so bad.   One day Susan went to church and heard something amazing. The preacher opened the Bible and spoke of a man with a funny name – Zacchaeus. Let’s call him Zak, for short. Everybody hated Zak. He always cheated people and took their money. Even the worst people in town were sure they were better than Zak. No one wanted him as a friend.   One day Jesus came to town. Everyone was excited and wanted desperately to see him. Even though many of them had not yet seen him, they had all heard about him. The whole country was talking about how good Jesus is. No one had ever known anyone so good as him and God always answered his prayers. He was sad whenever he saw anyone sick or hurting. He would pray for them and they would get well, even if they had been so sick that they were dying. He liked children and protected them whenever people said unkind things about them. And he told wonderful stories about God.   So everyone lined the streets hoping for a glimpse of this special man. Of course, Zak wanted to see Jesus, too, but even though he was a grownup, everyone laughed at him because he was no taller than a child. There were just too many people, and tiny Zak couldn’t see over their heads. He kept running from place to place hoping to find a gap in the crowd where he might be able to peek at Jesus, but even when he stood on tip toes and jumped, he was just too short. Then he had an idea. He ran ahead of Jesus and climbed a tree. He felt safe up there, hiding behind the leaves. No one would know he was there, so no one would laugh at him, and as he peered through the leaves he would get a good look at this wonderful man that everyone was talking about. Jesus came closer and closer and suddenly he looked up at Zak. Zak’s heart beat fast. Jesus called him by name.   “How does Jesus know my name?” he wondered, “Jesus is truly an amazing man.”   “Come down from the tree, Zak,” said Jesus tenderly, “I want to have dinner with you.”   Everyone was angry. Some of those who had lots of friends and thought they were good, had hoped Jesus might have chosen to have dinner with them, but instead Jesus chose the worst man in town – the one everyone hated.   “Look at who Jesus has chosen as a friend!” they complained, “Zak does bad things to people. He’s a cheat and a liar and a thief. What right does he have to be friends with Jesus?”   Zak was sad. He knew they were right. But Jesus insisted on having dinner with him. Zak had never been so excited in all his life and all the people looked on in amazement (Luke 19:1-10).   Jesus was always choosing as his friends people who were dirty or sick or bad or who were hated and had no friends. One day he was invited to a party and a woman came in who felt so very dirty. Everyone knew that she did bad things to men. She had not been invited to come. No one would ever have asked her. She felt so bad that she fell at Jesus’ feet and cried and cried and cried, making Jesus’ feet wet with her tears. Everyone expected Jesus to push her away but he not only let her stay, he praised her and told everyone that God had forgiven her of every bad thing she had ever done. In fact, he said that loving God is the most important thing and that those who love God the most are those who realize that God has forgiven them for the worst sins (Luke 7:36-50).   Another time, Jesus met a woman who was shaking in fear. She was so bad that everyone thought she should die because of the bad things she had done. In fact, they were going to kill her right then.   “Let whoever has never done anything bad be the first to hurt her,” said Jesus.   Everyone was shocked. They all thought they were much better than her, but Jesus’ words forced them to remember that they, too, had done wrong. One by one, they bowed their heads in shame and left. Finally, Jesus alone remained with the woman.   “Where are all those who accuse you of being bad?” he asked.   “They’ve all gone,” she replied.   “And I don’t find fault with you, either. Go in peace, and put an end to wrongdoing” (John 8:1-11).   Do you know what forgiveness means? It means that although you know someone has been bad, you treat that person as if he or she were good. You are as nice to that person as if he or she had never done anything wrong.   Jesus told a story about a man who had done lots and lots of good things. He was so proud of all the good things he had done that even though no one is perfect, he couldn’t think of anything bad that he should be sorry for and ask God to forgive. There was another man, said Jesus, who was so bad that he could find not one good thing to boast about. All he could do was beg God for forgiveness. Jesus said that it was the bad man who made God happy, not the good man. The bad man was good in God’s eyes because he was sorry and asked God for forgiveness. The man everyone had thought was good, however, remained unforgiven because he never thought he needed to ask God’s forgiveness. The little wrong things he had done stopped him from being perfect, but because the bad man had asked for God’s forgiveness, the man who had once been bad was perfect in God’s eyes (Luke 18:10-14). Jesus told this story so that we would understand that what makes us good in God’s sight is not what we have done in the past, but whether we have told God we are sorry and asked him to forgive us.   The preacher said Jesus is so special because he is the only person in the world who has never done one wrong thing. Not only is Jesus perfect, he had lived as king forever in heaven and then chose to come to earth as a little baby and grow up to teach people about God. No one knows God like he does. He left his riches and throne in heaven and came to earth because he loves bad people so much that he wants to be punished for the bad things they have done instead of them being punished.   Because only Jesus is perfect, every one of us deserves to be punished. Wonderful Jesus cares so much for each of us that he let himself be punished for us all. He let men blindfold him, spit on him and beat him and whip him and laugh at him and swear at him and say nasty things about him. They took off all his clothes in front of everyone, then forced nails into his body and hung him up for everyone to see and laugh as he cried in pain and slowly died. He took upon himself our punishment so that he could swap his goodness for our badness. He did it to make bad people good.   Just three days later, Jesus rose from the dead. By coming back to life, like no one else ever has, Jesus proved that he is a winner and that by suffering and dying in our place he really does make completely good and clean the dirtiest sinner who believes in him.   And guess who was the first person Jesus showed himself to in order to prove to the world that nothing, not even death, is as strong as him. He didn’t choose a king to show himself to. He didn’t choose someone rich or important, or even one of his disciples to be the first. He chose a woman who even today people think of as bad – a woman who had had seven dirty demons living inside her (Mark 16:9-11; John 20:1-18). She was once ugly and dirty inside but Jesus made her heart beautiful and as pure and clean as the whitest snow. As always, Jesus was choosing bad people as his special friends and making them good.   “Jesus has already taken all your punishment,” said the preacher. “Do you want Jesus to make you good?”   Susan was excited. Did she ever want to be made good!   The preacher continued, “If you want God to make you clean inside, you just have to pray this prayer and mean it: “Dear Jesus, thank you so much for being punished in my place and dying so that you could take my sin and give me your goodness. I am sorry for all the bad things I have done. I want you to make me as perfect in God’s eyes as you are. I give you all the bad I have ever done and I receive from you all the good that you have done. Thank you that this makes me so good that I can now be God’s child and he will look after me.”   Susan joyfully prayed that prayer and knew that even though she didn’t feel any different, and even if other people didn’t believe her, Jesus had truly made her good in God’s eyes. All day long she sang to herself, “I am good. Jesus makes me good. I am good. Jesus makes me good.”   God treated Susan as if she had never done a wrong thing in her whole life, and that’s just how God will treat you when you pray to Jesus like Susan did.   Susan desperately wanted a  good  parent – one who would be kind and gentle and thoughtful and never hurt her or do bad things to her. And yet she wasn’t too sure about God being a father. Men scared her. She needed someone strong, but someone gentle. She tried to trust God and she found to her joy that he was not like the men that she had known. God always treated her well. He was that kind person she had always hoped for, as well as her best friend, and her protector.   One day, a gentle voice spoke in Susan’s heart. She thought that maybe it was her own thoughts or perhaps her imagination, but it was God himself. “I am King of all of heaven and earth,” he said. “I can only live inside good people but because you trust Jesus and believe that he suffered and died for you, I have made you so good that I live inside of you. Like everyone who believes in me, I have made you my very own child so that I can show you great kindness and look after you. If I am the greatest of kings and you are my daughter, what does that make you?”   Susan thought hard. “God is a king and I am his daughter. What does that make me?” Suddenly she thought she knew the answer, but it seemed too good to be true. “It means I’m a princess?” she asked.   “Yes,” said God, “you are a princess – and better than even the greatest princess in the world. You are princess to me, the greatest king in heaven and earth.”   “Wow!” said Susan, stunned.   Susan often used to have a nightmare in which a tree would turn into a witch and tell Susan, “You are bad, you are bad, you are bad!” Now she knew that if ever that witch appeared, she could stamp her foot and say, “No! You are a liar! Jesus has made me good! I am God’s princess, so go away, you nasty witch!” And the witch would fill with shame and have to leave.   One day, Susan saw in her mind the man who had done bad things to her. It was like a dream only she was awake. This often used to happen to her. Although the man wasn’t really there, everything seemed so real. He wanted to hurt her and make her feel dirty just like he had so many times before. This time she stamped her foot and said, “No! I’m a princess! God lives inside of me. You can never do that to me again. You must leave right now or I’ll tell the police and they will put you in jail, you naughty man.” The man stared at her, stunned. He looked as big and as mean as ever, and Susan was as little as she had always been, but she stood firm. The man turned and left. Susan grinned from ear to ear, then jumped for joy. “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you for making me a princess!”   Susan was no longer sad that she was not an octopus. She no longer needed to make an ink cloud. She no longer needed to hide. She had no need to wish that parts of her body were not human. In fact, Susan discovered that God was very glad that she was a child and not an octopus. God loves animals. He loves plants and mountains and sunsets, too, but none of them can talk with God and share their hearts with him like children can. It is because Susan is a child that she can be God’s daughter, the King of kings’ princess. God likes her body just the way it is. He is proud of the way he had made her and he knows she is beautiful. And God thinks of you just like he thinks of Susan.   One day, a fierce monster of a demon appeared to Susan. He was so scary that even most grownups would shake in fear if they saw him. Suddenly Susan remembered who she was. “Go away!” she said, “I’m only four years old but I’m God’s princess. Jesus is with me, so you have to leave.” The demon didn’t like that at all. He turned the meanest and sounded the nastiest that he possibly could, but Susan was unmoved. He growled and spoke terrible lies about Susan, saying that she was bad and that she belonged to him and that no one could ever make him leave. Still he failed to fool Susan into thinking he was stronger than her. “Jesus has made me good and you must leave,” she said. He was ever so angry and looked as if he would kill her but even though he pretended not to show it, he knew Susan was God’s princess and when a princess speaks, everyone must obey. The demon had no choice. He left.   The above is based on the real experiences of the child alter of a child abuse survivor.

Powerful Answers & Surprising Help For People Traumatized as Children Healing your “Inner Child” / Inner Pain   Help for Alters (Insiders) and Sufferers of Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.)or Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)   If you suffered trauma as a child, the traumatized part of you could have separated from the rest of you and need special attention. Understanding this can be crucial for healing.     Is anyone too macho or mature to have ever been a child? No matter how much you might hate it, you are human.   We all long to push a distressing experience out of our mind and just get on with life without mentally coming to terms with it, but this is not nearly as heroic nor as helpful as we would like to think. Denying the reality of an inner wound does not prevent a suppressed part of us from acutely suffering, nor does it stop the pain from spilling over to the rest of our lives in ways that can make the cause frustratingly hard to identify. Unlike the power of resolving inner pain, the burden of trying to suppress pain is a dead weight keeping too many of us from the joyous freedom that would otherwise be ours.   I challenge you to embrace reality, embarking on a terrifyingly exciting adventure of self-discovery that could lead to more peace and fulfillment than you have ever dared believe possible. You can end inner pain.   Nevertheless, desperate times call for desperate measures. If, for example, an emergency were sufficiently serious, you might be brave enough to sacrifice a limb, cutting it off to save the rest of you.   Pain avoidance is not nearly as simple, however, as trying to cut unpleasant memories out of our lives. Consider someone with a seriously wounded leg. Pain in the injured leg might push him to opt for amputation but after surgery he could be devastated to find himself hounded by phantom limb pain in which he suffers pain as if the amputated limb were still there and as wounded as ever. Likewise, cutting ourselves off from painful memories is more drastic than we realize and rarely as effective in ending our distress as we suppose.   Such are the mysteries of inner (emotional) pain that to deepen our insight it will help to continue to look briefly at something slightly easier to understand: physical pain. If a gang of thugs kept beating you, it would hurt, of course, but by releasing such chemicals as adrenalin, your brain would temporarily shut down some of your consciousness of pain, thus helping you to flee from your attackers. Running when seriously injured brings great risk of inflaming the injuries – perhaps raising the risk to life-threatening levels – but the temporary necessity of escape overrides other vital concerns. So during the emergency, your mind’s partial suppression of your awareness of pain is a precious gift of God. Despite your understandable longing never to feel pain, however, once you are safe, continuing to have little consciousness of pain could be counter-productive. Without pain signaling the extent of your injuries – and hence alerting you to the urgency of seeking medical treatment – your well-being could be seriously impaired.   This natural response to physical trauma parallels our natural response to severe inner pain. In the short term, the suppression of your inner pain can be a blessing by helping you cope with the necessities of life. For as long as this suppression continues, however, it will keep you from healing.   Being human means we have an inbuilt need not merely to store facts but to process events both mentally and emotionally. That does not necessarily mean crying, but accessing the full range of human emotions and analyzing the experience until we fully come to terms with it, before finally offloading the pain in an emotionally healthy way. When we suffer something highly unpleasant we long to disconnect from the entire event and live as if it had never happened. But the memory and the need to respond to it in a fully human manner remains a part of us.   So to emotionally disconnect from the event is to disconnect from an essential part of who we are – a part of us that continues to exist and feel and attempts to grapple with the experience in an authentically human way – no matter how much we wish that part of us would die. We either help that part of our humanity find peace or we keep our lives in needless turmoil.   When people have something so horrible in their past that their mind recoils from the very thought of it, we can understand the mind trying to suppress all memory of the event. A simple blocking of the past would not work, however, if a person is continually reminded of it by, for example, having to endure similar trauma every few days. If the trauma is on-going, though less than twenty-four hours every day of every week, the mind has to employ a more sophisticated approach to maintaining sanity by giving itself a big a reprieve as possible whenever the trauma is not occurring. The mind has to divide itself so that part of it has the capacity to function whenever the person is being re-traumatized and another part is kept from awareness of what is happening so that it is able to function at times that are less traumatic without being hampered by conscious awareness of the horrors that occurred yesterday and the paralyzing fear that they might recur tomorrow.   Additional types of trauma – or trauma multiplying beyond the capacity of one part of the mind to cope – can cause further fragmenting of the mind. That way, no part has to cope with  every  horrific memory and the consciousness that more such horrors are likely. The mind-crippling task of trying to deal with everything at once is broken down into smaller, though still horrific, pieces.   It is not only memories that are compartmentalized because the person has to be able to function – often at quite a sophisticated level – while being traumatized. So intellectual abilities have to be divided up as well. Some abilities can be replicated in another part of the brain, just like a right-handed people can develop the side of their brain that controls their left hand so that they can get better at writing with their left hand. Not all abilities are replicated, however, with the result these people are usually more skilled than they realize until they learn about all their other parts.   Far from being a freak, these people have, from an early age, stumbled upon an ingenious mental strategy for coping with situations that are almost beyond human endurance.   As a child’s brain grows it becomes increasingly rigid and the ability to compartmentalize itself this way is lost if the process is not initiated by around about seven years of age. If someone learns the technique when young, however, the person can continue further compartmentalizing his/her brain later in life.   So traumatized children – especially those who are artistically and/or intellectually gifted – have a remarkable ability. They can suppress inner pain by splitting into a functioning part of them that is fully aware of their suffering, and a part of them that is much less aware. It has been theorized that the split might come about through them trying to cope by intensely imagining that the horrific experience is happening to someone else, but even babies can split. Because each part of the person grapples alone with a different set of events, each part has a unique awareness of certain emotional pain, and hence a distinct consciousness.   Many people call these disconnected parts of a person  alters . Sometimes they are referred to as  insiders . Some people simply use the term  parts . I very much like this last term, even though I don’t use it much in my pages because the word is so common that it would not help search engine users find the webpage. “Alter” sounds too alien and even “insider” sounds a little spooky. “Part” helps reinforce that each alter is a part of the one person. Each time a new alter is discovered, it is finding a vital part of oneself that you were not even aware was missing.   Alters act like persons within a person. They are part of the full person (although they might not realize it) and they make their own decisions and have feelings, intelligence, and an individual personality.   Writes one of Alice’s alters to one of Jake’s alters (two of my friends who have let me share this with you – names changed to protect anonymity):   I want you to know that I respect and admire you for your courage to split off and keep this secret from Jake so that he could survive. What a sacrifice you have made. It is like agreeing to live with a knife in your heart for the sake of the others.   The benefit of splitting is that the part of the person not conscious of the worst aspects of the trauma is better able to soldier on with life’s daily demands. As we have seen also applies to a wounded person fleeing an attacker, a lowered consciousness of the severity of the trauma can, in the short term, prove a clever coping mechanism, but there is a serious downside.   A part of you could have been so desperate to protect the rest of you by keeping unpleasant feelings and information from you that it severs lines of communication with you. The unintended consequence, however, is that the restricted flow of information operates in both directions. The price of making painful information inaccessible to you is that vital information you discover later in life cannot get back to the hurting part of you.   That part of you left to cope alone with the full force of the trauma not only continues to reel in pain, it never gets to move on or grow up. The isolated, hurting part of you remains trapped at approximately the same mental age and limited knowledge, year after year. Usually it cannot benefit from new insights you gain later in life – insights that would otherwise have enabled the hurting part of you to heal. For example, the inner child in a sex abuse survivor remains unable to see through the abuser’s former lies that the adult part of the person can see through. So the damaging power of those haunting lies continues, and the person fails to heal.   Similarly, the suppressed, hurting part cannot access the spiritual understanding that the person gained later in life. Thankfully, the disconnected part can be taught these liberating, healing truths but usually this can happen only if that part of the person is acknowledged and dialog takes place in which these truths are taught as one would teach anyone else of similar “age” and experiences. Unless this happens, the deeply hurting, unhealed part will remain with the person for life, and make its presence felt in mysteriously vague, unpleasant ways.   Sadly, fear of the unknown and false shame make it exceedingly difficult for most people to face the possibility that they have alters. In actual fact, if I discovered I had multiple personalities, I’d be excited about it, but I have the advantage of understanding all the benefits flowing from such a diagnosis.   No matter how much you suppress alters and live in denial, if you have alters, they are an inseparable part of you. Keeping them suppressed would sentence you to remaining only a shadow of the wonderful person you could be. Yes, when alters first surface they have pain and problems, but the key is not to try to rid yourself of these essential parts of you but to help them heal – and this is fairly easy. Anyone trying to suppress alters is like someone with injured fingers and toes who, instead of tending the wounds, wants to hack off all his arms and legs! Each alter has unique gifts or abilities, such as creativity or a special skill or valuable character trait or a key to healing that will empower you to soar beyond what you could otherwise achieve.   If You Don’t Have Alters   You don’t need multiple personalities to have a wounded inner child. A woman, who as far I know does not have alters, has given me permission to share the following:   Just over a year ago I purchased a Christian CD of baby lullabies and sent it to my new grandson. I kept thinking about that CD. The next time I was in town I purchased one for  myself . I would have never thought of it on my own. I’ve never known anyone to suggest such a thing. It was a revelation from the Holy Spirit. For weeks that turned into months I had this music playing softly while I read my Bible and prayed. I was absolutely amazed at the nurturing and healing that came to me from such music in the background. It was an inexpensive investment that paid big dividends for me.   You just might want to give some thought to purchasing a children’s Christian CD to see if it doesn’t help heal the inner child in you that was neglected (or at least not supported very well) in childhood. Sometimes we need to become that little child again before we can move on.   How Can You Know if You Have an Alter?   Should you have alters, becoming aware of this fact is unlikely to be easy. After all, they formed to keep things from you. Moreover, needless fears and misconceptions about the implications of having alters cause most people’s minds to recoil from the thought of having alters. The result is high psychological pressure for people with alters to remain unaware of their alters. So despite all the healing advantages of finding that you have alters, things are stacked against you discovering them.   Winning the trust of a terrified jackrabbit might be less of a challenge, but the only sure way to discover alters is to so win their confidence that they decide to talk to you regularly. Until alters feel safe to do this, you can only look for vague clues. Should you have alters, do not expect to have any awareness of, at best, more than a few of the symptoms mentioned below.   Although some people with alters have obvious gaps in their memory of the distant past, there are some who, even before healing begins, have a more detailed and complete memory of their childhood than average people who have never had alters. This is because alters do not necessarily retain sole memory of certain events. What they keep to themselves (until they begin to heal) is the deepest emotional reaction to certain traumatic events. Rather than mere facts, it is particularly emotional ownership of these events that they keep from the rest of the person.   So people with undetected alters might not necessarily have missing years. They might, however, have the occasional missing moment in everyday life that cannot be attributed to alcohol or drugs. They might, for instance, lose keys or other personal items and find them in places where they cannot recall putting them. Other possibilities include goods appearing that they cannot recall purchasing, inexplicable bank account withdrawals, finding themselves somewhere with no recollection of how they got there, or having no memory of doing things in the recent past that other people claim to have witnessed them doing.   Sometimes people with alters discover that they can protect themselves from self-harm or other unwanted behavior by hiding   from themselves  knives, credit cards or whatever. They know where they placed the objects, and yet putting them in an unusual place works when an alter does not observe the hiding.   If you have sole access to your computer, check  History  on your Internet Browser to see if you have visited websites you cannot recall having seen. If you retain electronic copies of sent emails, check them to see if you recognize them all. An itemized phone bill, credit card account, or anything else tracking your actions might also be revealing.   Of course, we all have memory lapses but with alters, lapses are usually more pronounced than for most people. Some people have even feared Alzheimer’s, when their lapses were simply due to a suppressed part of the person taking over for a while and doing and thinking things that it keeps hidden from the rest of the person. It is tragically common for people with alters to be called liars when their denials are simply because they genuinely don't remember certain things.   Until healing progresses, alters are particularly active when the rest of the person is asleep. You could wake up to find things moved. It might just be sleepwalking but it could be more.   I used to provide e-mail support for abuse survivors. With several different survivors I have suddenly received an e-mail that seems out of character for that person. Besides the subject matter seeming unusual, the grammar and spelling is often more childlike than their usual standard. Sometimes I initially thought that maybe the person wrote the e-mail while under the influence of drugs or alcohol but often it turns out that it is the child part of them temporarily taking over. When I send a copy of the e-mail to the person, he or she is often shocked, having no recollection of having ever written it.     Had the correspondence been handwritten, most likely there would be a noticeable change in handwriting. So another clue to the presence of alters is changes in handwriting in, for example, one’s journal. In fact, keeping a journal is a good idea, especially doing so at different times of the day (different times and situations are more likely to reveal different alters). You might be surprised what you find later when re-reading your journal.   Some adult survivors sometimes find themselves acting in a childlike way. They might, for example, have a collection of children’s toys. Again, to some extent, we all have times when we act a little childlike, but when it is more pronounced, it could be the inner child temporarily making his/her presence felt.   Another possible indicator of an alter is sometimes having certain abilities and sometimes not. You might, for example, have created artwork or poems of a standard far beyond what you think yourself capable of. Or you might be mystified as to why you are occasionally unable to do something – perhaps to spell or read music or some other skill – that at other times you can easily do.   Since she was seven, a friend of mine was hopeless at mathematics and yet she kept getting high marks in the subject. She could ace a test, go home and find herself quite unable to solve simple math problems. At college she elected to complete the same algebra course with the same teacher not once, not twice but three times because, despite continually getting high grades, she didn’t have a clue about the subject. Determined not to let it beat her, she even tried to do the course a fourth time, but her teacher forbade her on the grounds that she was too good at the subject to keep repeating it. It was not until she was in her late thirties that she discovered an alter of hers, formed at age seven, who not only specialized in mathematics but who, out of fear of being pushed aside by other parts of the person, deliberately kept the rest of the person mathematically ignorant.   Another possible clue is having extended times in which one feels unreal, as if in a dream or not really there. Some describe it as like observing everything from behind a glass wall. It is known as co-consciousness.   Another possibility, is sometimes thinking of oneself as “we” or “us,” or feeling as if there is another person inside of you.   Hearing voices that seem to come from inside you is yet another possibility. What these voices say could seem a little strange – as might be expected from someone who has suffered bizarre and terrifying abuse – but, in contrast to people with certain other conditions, the voices are relatively rational and sane.   Another clue is occasionally having two conflicting emotions; perhaps, for example, feeling happy and yet deep inside feeling sad and trapped.   All of the above are common symptoms of what therapists call Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.). Not everyone has every symptom and any supposed symptoms should only be regarded as clues, not diagnostic proof. For example, an embarrassed woman confided to a friend of mine that she kept losing her keys. “What is emotionally upsetting you?” asked my discerning friend. The problem turned out not to be D.I.D., nor Alzheimer’s, but simply a reaction to stress.   There are questionnaire-type psychological tests designed to diagnose D.I.D. They can only be administered by professionals and are expensive. See  Psychological Tests to Diagnose Dissociative Identity Disorder.   Not as Weird as You Think   An older term for Dissociative Identity Disorder is Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Regardless of name, its existence has been recognized by researchers at least as early as the 1800s.   In a sense, we all have multiple personalities and switch between them according to our circumstances. We would act differently, for instance, in each of the following circumstances:     *  In the presence of a head of state *  When alone with our spouse *  On a night out with the girls/guys *  When playing with children *  When depressed   In other ways, too, everyone has “multiple personalities.” For example, we might say, “My heart says one thing, but my head says another.” The ability to see things from such different perspectives can be a significant asset. When indecisive, we speak of being “in two minds.” When dieting we are not sure which part of us will win – the part wanting to be thin or part wanting to keep eating. In Romans 7, Paul devoted almost an entire chapter detailing the battle within myself between the part of him wanting to obey God and the part wanting to indulge himself. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15).   So having multiple personalities is not nearly as abnormal as it first seems. Moreover, dissociation is normal. In order to focus on the task at hand, all of us sometimes temporarily put unpleasant memories out of our minds, or tune out to such distractions as background noises. It is just that for some people this natural tendency is done to a greater extent. For them, shutting off awareness of certain distressing things is done so effectively that a separate consciousness forms within the person, with part of the person knowing, feeling and thinking some things that the other part does not.   Therapists sometimes call each distinct identity an  alternate personality  or, to use a term already introduced,  alter  for short. As mentioned, the term  insider  is also sometimes used, and some feel more comfortable with the term  part . The personality that controls the person most often is usually referred to as the  host .   The distinction between host and other parts is seldom set in concrete. A part that has been host for years might suddenly feel overwhelmed or experience new trauma that causes it to go into deep hiding. Another alter is then forced to take over, or a new one is formed for the purpose. The new host might later on split and form new alters who see themselves as having split off from the new host, and feel more connected to the new host than to the former host. Over a lifetime, someone might end up having had several hosts. Sometimes more than one alter might simultaneously share the role of host.   Since the host is the part most seen in public, other alters often sacrifice themselves to “protect” the host from distressing feelings and/or memories, thus enabling the host – the public face of the system of alters – to better maintain the appearance of normality. They also do this to free the host from oppressive distractions that would hinder the host’s ability to perform important functions such as succeeding in school or employment.   A part might become host due to having the best selection of natural abilities for the role but, if for no reason other than having the most relevant experience, the host usually ends up with the best social skills and other abilities, such as work skills, needed for everyday living. So a change of host is not only usually precipitated by a trauma, it is itself traumatic because the host takes into hiding with him or her vital information needed for everyday living. The new host is left to flounder, having to try to pick up knowledge on the fly.   The host might have had the most opportunities to develop, but every part of a person is important. While they remain separated, each part has exclusive access to part of the person’s intellectual capacity. To be whole, a person needs every part. Moreover, given half a chance, other parts can develop astonishingly and in ways that the host could never achieve.   People (hosts) who are just becoming aware that have D.I.D. are often tempted to feel superior to their alters and regard them as little more than nuisances. A friend of mine, who is himself a host, beautifully corrects this mistaken notion:   In my system, I’m the “host”. By that I mean I’m the one my alters laid their lives on the line to protect. I’m the one for whom my alters gave up so much in order to keep safe. I’m the one they held above the water, while they drowned, as it were. They gave up living in this life and held on to agonizingly painful experiences and situations so that I could survive and move on, while for years they were locked away in the dark haunted by those experiences without contact with the outside world.   I owe them everything, and each time I communicate with any of them I do my best to treat them with the same respect that I would treat someone who lost their legs diving under a truck to save the life of one of my children. Yes, they can be  very  angry. Yes, they can be annoying, controlling, distracting, painful to live with, but so might someone dealing with the consequences of having lost their legs saving my child. Regardless of that anger, I would happily immerse myself in it to give them one ounce of relief, especially after what they went through for me. It’s the least I could do.   The exciting thing is that I’ve found that as I treat them with respect and let them know that their needs are important to me by working with them on getting those needs met and allowing them time to just be themselves in a safe environment where they aren’t judged, they heal. They start to realize that those situations they held deep inside themselves have now past, and that they are now safe. As they are cared for, they start to use their skills to contribute meaningfully to our family – the whole person of whom I am a part.   For example, I have an alter called Do, who is very fast at getting things done. He now helps when we have limited time to get things done really quickly. This morning he came out to help me get my kids ready for swimming lessons. He managed to get them completely dressed, bags packed, everything in under eight minutes. Normally that would take me around an hour.   As mentioned, if you suspect you have an alters, conversing directly with them is the only sure way to confirm their existence, but that can be as challenging as trying to entice undercover agents to admit they have been spying on you and freely tell you everything. Moreover, getting to this point with an alter is a life-changing step not to be taken lightly. Once one alter begins spilling the beans and finding acceptance, others are likely to become emboldened to likewise make themselves known, and your life will probably never be the same again. Even if – as I expect will happen – by the journey’s end it proves highly beneficial, there will almost certainly be times when you regret ever starting this journey to peace and wholeness. I warn you not to start this process without being sure you are led of God in every step of the way, including your choice of counselor. On the other hand, doing nothing (and so keeping alters feeling rejected and in more or less enforced solitary confinement) is also strewn with dangers. In fact, doing nothing could be the worst mistake of your life.   Alters typically carry so much pain that ignoring them might be all it takes to make them suicidal. I wish I didn’t have to give this chilling warning, but to end up with a suicidal alter could be more than just unpleasant for you, it is at least theoretically possible for that alter to succeed in killing you despite you wanting to live.   The most knowledgeable people say you should never act solely on the basis of written information about Dissociative Identity Disorder but should seek an appropriately qualified and experienced professional, and that even such experts, like other health professions, need liability insurance. Certainly, this webpage is no do-it-yourself manual and despite my considerable experience helping people with alters I should not call myself an expert. On the other hand, I know of only one infallible expert – the Lord Jesus Christ – and I plead with you to earnestly seek his guidance before doing anything, and likewise before deciding for the exceedingly risky option of doing nothing.   It is not uncommon for abuse survivors to go through life unaware that there are suppressed parts of them (alters) until one of the alters finally makes his/her presence felt when the person is beginning to heal. Alters have two pressing, but conflicting, needs. One is to burst out of the agony of solitary confinement by communicating with someone. The other need is to avoid further rejection and ridicule by remaining in isolated silence. When their host begins to seem more accepting of them or they find someone such as a trustworthy, understanding counselor or friend who they think might accept them, the balance between these conflicting needs could tip in favor of the alters believing it seems safe enough to risk revealing themselves. So they might suddenly start communicating for the first time. If they think they can trust someone more than their host, they might briefly switch off their host’s awareness so that the host knows nothing of the conversation.   So despite alters longing to end their isolation, it is rare for them to reveal themselves if they think they are likely to be rejected or thought lowly of. If you have alters, they will probably be able to hear your thoughts and words on some occasions but not on others. So an alter could perhaps be enticed to converse with you if you were, on several different occasions, to say to yourself something along these lines:   If anyone can hear me, I want to apologize for any way I have offended you. I didn’t want to believe you were real but I now understand that I was wrong. I want to love and accept you and would value you sharing with me. Please speak to me.   Don’t try this right now, however.  There are dangers to avoid that are explained in the rest of this webpage and the two webpages it leads to.   It usually helps if you speak out loud (or at least in an audible whisper) to your alters. If you suspect you might know the alter’s name or something about the alter, use this information as you speak. This, too, might increase the chance of a reply.   Understanding Alters   Even though having alters is a common, well-documented reaction to childhood trauma, it is usual for people, upon first discovering that they have alters, to find it deeply disturbing and seek repeated assurance that they are not going insane. In reality, for any of us who have alters, the discovery is a very healthy sign and a significant step towards far more peace, joy and fulfillment than we have ever known.   As explained in a link at the end of this series of pages, I believe that Dissociative Identity Disorder develops the brain beyond what it otherwise would have, such that when a person begins to heal from the disorder, having had multiple personalities actually turns out to be an intellectual advantage. Of course, until healing commences, having Dissociative Identity Disorder is primarily a disadvantage because and each alter (and the host) has access to only a portion of the person’s brain.   Feelings of confusion as well as strange symptoms are normal for people recovering from D.I.D. From time to time, a friend of mine would ask the Lord what was wrong with him. Each time God would simply but very tenderly reply:     You have alters. I’m healing you. It is most unfortunate that in old, ill-informed circles, schizophrenia was mislabeled “split personality.” This grossly inappropriate name might cause someone unfamiliar with psychology to wrongly imagine there could be a link between schizophrenia and what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. There is not even a superficial similarity. Unlike schizophrenia, Dissociative Identity Disorder does not cause bouts of insanity, nor is it helped by medication (although someone with D.I.D. might have additional conditions like depression that might be helped by medication). The differences go on and on.   The term bi-polar is even less likely to be confused with Multiple Personality Disorder but just to be sure, let me assure you that this condition is also very different to what we are discussing.   A friend of mine was seeking a prayer partner that he could be transparent with. The man he had in mind was a psychologist who attended his home fellowship. My friend prayed fervently before approaching the man and wisely tested the waters by asking his view of Dissociative Identity Disorder. His response being favorable, my friend confided that he had alters. The psychologist’s response was, “Wow! That’s usually only reserved for the highly intelligent or artistically gifted!”   In telling me about the incident, my friend said he was obviously an exception to this trend. That’s the response I expected from him – and from you, if you have D.I.D.. People with D.I.D. tend to be so tragically hit by low self esteem that they do not presently realize how gifted they are. Though the significance of his abilities seems not to register with my friend, he is both artistic and of well above average intelligence. In fact, his childhood abuse and putdowns had squashed his artistic leanings, and befriending one of his young alters is releasing his beautiful artistic gift within him. In addition to the huge handicap of battling emotional pain and other unhealed effects of his past, his poor spelling contributed to him feeling intellectually inferior. He is actually so intelligent that in a college course he took there was a firm rule that no one with poor spelling could graduate. Those in charge were embarrassed into breaking their own rule. How could they “fail” their top student? He was so exceptional that he was tutoring his fellow students. Yet still he thought he was stupid. And if you have D.I.D., you’ll agree that he was smart but are likely to still be convinced that you are not.   Here’s an interesting sidenote: This man emailed me frequently for about a year before I discovered that he had alters. I had come to recognize his intelligence and assumed the atrocious spelling in his e-mails was due to dyslexia. A while after I encouraged him to recognize and be kind to his alters (he had previously mistaken them for demons) he began to send near-perfect e-mails. Alters that were good at spelling had surfaced.   It is not without reason that D.I.D. has been called “sophisticated” and “one of the most functional responses a child can make to a very traumatic childhood.” That is not to suggest, however, that it is desirable for people facing new crises to yield to the temptation to split yet again. Just how counterproductive splitting can be was rammed home to me when a friend of mine was learning a very stressful new job. She needed every bit of previous experience and more. Despite us not wanting it to happen, in an unconscious attempt to cope with the stress, a new alter formed. This poor alter was formed with all of the host’s years of extensive work experience wiped from her memory. Trying to cope under these circumstances greatly magnified the stress. Thankfully, little damage was done because I was able to immediately support the new alter and my friend changed jobs. Very many years before, my friend’s trauma had caused an alter to form that did not even know how to read or write. Trying to cope proved exceedingly challenging. This alter eventually relearned and developed such courage and skills that she ended up a significant help to her host. It was a very tough journey, however.   An alter e-mailed a man with Dissociative Identity Disorder who in despair had called himself a freak:   We are not freaks; we are people forced to carry burdens beyond human endurance. We were smart enough not to go insane but to split. It was the best we could do. That isn’t a freak; it’s someone being denied the help they desperately needed and resorting to extreme measures to save themselves. Would you call a shipwreck survivor who got an infection and had to chop of his own arm to save the rest of him a freak? No, you’d say, “Wow, that was brave” Well, that is what you are: brave. You hid the pain to protect yourself and did what you had to stay alive. That is brave, not freaky.   It has been estimated that between one to three percent of the general population in western countries suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder. I expect it would be far higher in, for example, war-ravished countries.   The Amazing Healing Power of Dealing with Alters   A man would not only sometimes wet his bed, he found himself peculiarly reluctant to clean up afterwards. He preferred to lie in the mess. You might find this bizarre, but it was equally inexplicable to him until he discovered he had alters. After gaining the trust of one of his child alters, the alter confided that he had learnt that a wet bed was the only way to keep a family sex abuser out of his bed. Not only was the man relieved to know for the first time that there was a rational explanation for his disturbing behavior, he now had a strategy for finding a cure. He began prayerfully focusing on finding ways to convince his alter that he was now safe. He could experiment, for example, with assuring the alter than the abuser had left and that never again was he in danger of being molested in bed.   A woman decided to conquer her fear of driving by becoming a professional truck driver. After years of driving experience she had abundantly convinced herself that she was a safe and highly capable driver, and yet she still felt uncomfortable about driving. Finally, rather than remaining only vaguely aware that she had alters, she began befriending them. She discovered a child alter who, not surprisingly, had no consciousness of driving expertise gained later in life, and was scared of riding in vehicles. Empowered by this awareness of the alter’s fears, the woman was able to work towards curing the discomfort the alter felt when driving. She was able to try such things as informing the alter of her driving expertise (this proved a significant source of relief), and encouraging the alter to enter into faith-filled prayer, trusting in divine protection when traveling on the road.   A Christian woman knew the Scriptures affirming that her sins were forgiven but still she was plagued with strong guilt feelings. It turned out that her child alter had a lesser understanding of the gospel than the adult part of her. Once the child alter had the good news of God’s forgiveness more fully explained to her, the relief was remarkable.   An abuser said he would chop off a little boy’s penis. The threat was so convincing and terrifying that at that very instant an alter formed. Since, as previously explained, alters have access to only a fraction of the information that is known to the person as a whole, it is not surprising that this alter was left unaware that the threat was never carried out. The alter spent decades of needless torment until finally it was specifically explained to the alter that he had not been maimed. From then on the host enjoyed relief and no longer awoke fearing that he had been maimed.   A woman often used to walk in her sleep. She got little sleep as it was, without having a disturbed sleep. Sometimes her son would find her wandering the house. Sometimes she would wake in the morning to find things rearranged and – most frustrating of all – she would have to hunt everywhere for her keys that were not where she had left them.   One day as I was chatting with her child alter, the alter mentioned in passing that last night she had slept all night. That immediately got my attention. “What do you usually do?” I asked.   It turned out that the alter only felt safe to play without ridicule when everyone else was asleep. She particularly liked playing with keys and her host had moved her other toys away from the bed, so she had to get up to access them.   “I try not to wake Mommy (her host),” she said. “Please don’t tell her.”   I gently persuaded her that her host would not be angry and obtained her permission to let the host know. It turned out that the host had overheard part of the conversation anyhow.   The host and alter were able to work out some amicable and effective solutions. An obvious start was to keep the toys by the edge of the bed, so that the alter could play with them in bed. Better still, the host explained to the alter how they would both feel more refreshed if they slept at the same time, and the host began slotting into her waking hours a time when her alter could play in privacy. She also purchased a pocket doll for her alter to play with when she was at work. Both alter and host benefited from this new level of mutual understanding and cooperation – and enjoyed better quality sleep.   One woman was tormented by horrific flashbacks of the abuse she had suffered as a child. Then her child alter was taught that because she was a child of the King of kings, she was a princess, and since princesses must be obeyed, she had the God-given authority to command abusers, demons, and so on, to leave. Soon after, the woman was having one of her terrifying flashbacks. Suddenly the child alter rose up and told the abuser in the flashback that he must leave her because she was a princess. In her mind’s eye the abuser left and the flashback abruptly ended. Similar things happened during nightmares and demonic appearances. Not surprisingly, the woman found peace like she had never before known.   A woman used to find clothes shopping and even dressing so distressingly confusing and frustrating that she would often end up in tears over it. When she learnt about her alters, she discovered that the source of the confusion was that each alter had completely different tastes in clothes. Since they had a beautifully close relationship with God, they agreed to let God select their clothes each time they dressed or shopped. It worked.   It is not impossible for alters to believe they are the opposite sex to their host. Such alters form because of the need to feel safe, not because of homosexual tendencies. One can well understand abused children supposing that being the opposite sex would lower their chances of further abuse and so wish they were that gender. Both boys and girls have thought this and, in the case of their particular abuser, they are often right. Moreover, if children are sexually abused by a member of the same sex, it can be expected to affect their sexual identity and they might even be labeled by their abuser as being the opposite sex. It is not surprising that some alters suffering this fully take on this false identity and genuinely believe they are the oppose sex. They can have so little body awareness that they believe their actual body is fully the opposite sex to what it really is. Not surprisingly, sexual confusion results, but this can be resolved by helping them realize that there is no need for them to be of their imaginary gender in order to be safe or loved. Only after ensuring they realize that their safety and acceptance is not at stake should the actual gender of their bodies be pointed out to them. This delay is necessary because knowing their real gender is likely to be a significant shock to them, and one that would be most disturbing without the preparation just mentioned. Great care must be taken in dealing with this sensitive issue. Imagine your reaction if you were to discover that you are not the gender you had always thought you were.   With many of his alters thinking themselves to be little children – far too young for marital relations – and a few of his alters thinking they were the opposite sex, it is no wonder that a man I know often had great difficulty making love to his wife. Identifying alters, helping them to discover their true gender and helping them to mature was the key to healing his sexuality.   The above are just eight of many examples I could cite from people I know that demonstrates what a powerful key to healing it is to listen to alters and tenderly address their needs and fears. Unknown to you, a traumatized part of you could be sabotaging your eating habits, your determination to resist temptation, your will to live, your Christian walk – all sorts of things. No matter how devout and determined you are, trying to do the right thing is an oppressively hard, discouraging slog when part of you is surreptitiously sabotaging your efforts, or is unaware of key spiritual truths. Life fills with joy, peace and victory when alters are helped and every part of you knows God and is drawing upon the power of Christ.   I have found that if you treat alters as real, the breakthroughs in a person’s long term problems is phenomenal, provided you minister to each alter in the power of Christ as you would to a normal person who had suffered that way. In fact, I have never seen anything so powerful in bringing about speedy transformations in hurting people.   Christians commonly suffer the frustration of what they might call being unable to turn head knowledge into heart knowledge. Some might think of it in terms of knowing intellectually what should be a life-changing spiritual truth and yet the knowledge does not set them free because their “subconscious” has not grasped it. Speaking to alters enables one to minister directly to that “subconscious,” normally unreachable part of the person; achieving in minutes what might otherwise take years. It’s nothing like hypnosis. It is simply enabling people to liberate a suppressed part of them that, through being kept ignorant of certain truths, had been surreptitiously undermining their well-being.   Humans can concoct a hundred theories as to the best way to treat anything, but any scientist will tell you that going by one’s personal experience with treating people is a very unreliable way of proving which treatment is the most effective.   Like any Christian, I try to be led of God in the way I minister to people. Unlike some, however, I seem unable to hear God speaking directly to me. I’m embarrassed to admit that I usually seem able to do little better than just pray and hope for the best. As I have continued ministering to alters, however, I have been staggered to note how exactly the way God ministers to alters coincides with the way I have felt led to do it.   No matter how many human theories there are, I want to imitate God’s approach, since he knows infinitely more than any of us as to what is truly best. The apostle Paul displayed this attitude of seeking to imitate God:     1 Corinthians 11:1  Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.    And Christ himself had this same attitude:   John 5:19  . . . I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.   As is the case with belief in demons, or opinions about the most appropriate treatment for a specific disease, or almost anything else in the world, there is a wide range of theories about Dissociative Identity Disorder and whether it even exists. One reason for the confusion is that alters, having suffered devastating levels of rejection in the past, are highly sensitive and will go into hiding in the presence of anyone they fear could reject them (including a counselor, researcher or even the host person). If anyone were to convince a host that alters are not real and that the host should reject as an illusion any manifestation of an alter, alters would panic and quickly go into hiding, rather than risk rejection. At the apparent disappearance of alters, the host will temporarily feel relief, rather like the cruel relief felt by a cancer patient wrongly declared to be cancer-free. It will seem like a magical cure, but the person’s underlying problems will remain and his/her true relief will be greatly hampered.   Someone might possibly reach the point where he or she is enabling continued dissociation. For example, child alters can be so cute that it is tempting to hold on to them by hindering them from maturing. At least in early counseling or relating to alters, however, it seems to me best to ensure one has thoroughly ministered to each alter, rather than frantically rush into trying to get the alters fused into one person. Like being opened up by a surgeon, treating alters as individuals makes wounded parts accessible for treatment. It would be foolish for a surgeon to sew up a person while there are still inner parts that need attention.   Moreover, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder have been cruelly robbed of the childhood they deserve. Having childlike alters who are relieved of their pain provides these deserving people the privilege of re-living childhood for a while as it was meant to have been enjoyed. Yes, there is a time to move on, but there is also a time to enjoy. In fact, one host who was continually frustrated over what to him seemed the slow rate of healing, actually felt guilty about enjoying legitimate pleasures. This false guilt, quite typical of people suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, was the product of his abusive upbringing in which he was usually punished for acting like a normal fun-loving child. He found it wonderfully liberating to discover that God delighted in him catching up on missed childhood pleasures by enjoying them now, even though he was an adult. Ironically, his frustration at not integrating sooner was actually slowing his healing because he would keep suppressing (and so hurting) alters who wanted to play.   Another reason for not trying to force the pace is that the very thought of being united can initially be traumatic for alters because it could be misinterpreted as an attempt to annihilate them. When the matter is treated gently, however, alters can be encouraged to see union as a maturing and as a marriage in which two (or more) truly are better than one and no one loses his or her identity but each contributes his or her own strengths and retains his or her own memories and benefits from the other’s strengths. Like marriage, it should be a union in which partners are so self-assured that they feel no need to keep asserting their independence. One alter described it as becoming more alive than ever. It is very fulfilling. The decision is up to each individual alter, however. Moreover, what is often the first stage towards merging – alters learning to value each other and work together as a team – is far more important than merging.   Discerning Between Demons & Multiple Personalities   In an attempt to keep secret their crime, abusers with occult knowledge sometimes deliberately transfer a demon to their victims to keep alters too terrorized reveal themselves and the abuse they suffered. Even when this occurs, it might not apply to all the alters a person has. For example, once a person learns how to split, further splits could occur in response to new traumas after the original abuser has left. Of course, if any alters are suppressed by demons, those alters are free to reveal themselves once the demons are ejected.   Even though the above was not the specific reason, I know several people who discovered they have alters only after being delivered from demons. Not only are alters not demons, however, confusing them with demons could prove disastrous. Nevertheless, we are about to see that, especially with some alters, many things make them disturbingly easy to mistake for demons. The three main reasons are that before alters begin to heal:   1.     Some can seem evil   2.     They can give themselves bizarre names    3.     They themselves can be confused about their identity.   Let’s explore this.   Why Alters Can Seem Evil   Early contact with an alter is likely to be unpleasant because this is when an alter is most raw and hurting. Some alters even choose to test whether they will be rejected by deliberately acting offensive in their initial contact. Others can do nasty things in a frantic attempt simply to break out of their isolation and get their host to listen to them. An alter once seemed to try to seduce me. She later admitted that she had observed my moral standards with her host before she revealed herself and she was actually trying to offend me by her apparent seduction because she expected that I’d reject her and she thought she might as well get the rejection over with. On the other hand, great integrity is needed when relating to alters because they can be so desperate for love and approval as to be tempted to do almost anything to obtain it.   We have noted that when alters first make their presence felt they are likely to have been cut off from many years of developments in their hosts’ life. Alters that formed before a person became a Christian or when the person was backslidden are therefore likely to have been cut off from exposure to the Gospel and know nothing of a living relationship with Christ. So we can expect them to act like non-Christians. Moreover, alters have suffered almost beyond the realms of human endurance. So it should not surprise if, in their attempt to cope with severe suffering, they gained an undesirable addiction, or are filled with hate or rage because they misinterpreted their misfortune as abandonment by God, or they use strong language to forcefully express their pain or pent up anger and frustration.   Bizarre Names   Any of the factors so far mentioned are enough for alters to act in a manner that is out of character for the host person, as he/she is today, and for such alters to superficially seem demonic. Even more confusing is that alters can give themselves names that anyone not experienced with alters might assume would be the exclusive domain of demons. In the webpages you are reading, almost all the Spirit-inspired quotes from an alter are from one who originally called herself “Reject.” A sister alter called herself “Pain,” another, “Failure,” and another, who felt so rejected by God that she wanted to set herself up as her own god called herself “Divinity.” I have yet to come across alters that that assume the name “Evil” or “Devil,” but such names seem quite likely, given the strong tendency of abusers to keep authoritatively telling their young, impressionable victims that they are evil.   Alters Confused About Their Own Identity   In the battle not to mistake an alter for a demon, it is confusing enough finding alters who hate God, act in nasty ways that for the host person is out of character, and give themselves bizarre names, but it is made even worse by many alters doubting or denying their humanity.   It is common for alters to yearn to be human but to have doubts about whether they really are. Part of this is because they were formed as a result of abuse in which they were treated as objects, rather than as humans who had feelings and a will of their own. Also, to dull their pain, many alters have blocked off almost all feeling and this can make them feel less than human.   On the other hand, some alters do not want to be human. One alter who kept telling me she was not human revealed that she did not want to be human because humans feel (and are thus exposed to feeling pain) and humans must cope with their sexuality (she feared she was gay and in any case, to her, sex meant abuse). She added that if she were human she would have to relate to other humans and so be exposed to the possibility of rejection. Ironically, this alter was highly offended by the thought of anyone mistaking her for a demon, and unlike demons, who like living in human bodies, she wanted to leave earth completely and live in her imaginary spaceship.   We must remember that fantasy can be a powerful way of escaping an intolerable reality and that children are both highly imaginative and impressionable.   It would be easy to mistake for a demon an alter who kept insisting he was a dog. I have spoken to such an alter. The man with this alter was traumatized as a child by being sexually molested by a dog. The alter hated what had happened and concluded that only a dog could be treated that way.   On a more positive side, when we consider children’s love of animals and the peaceful lives that animals often seem to have, it should not surprise us that in a desperate attempt to feel safe and escape the reality of their suffering, some alters might choose to convince themselves that they are animals. And given the alienation that abused children often feel, or their longing to escape human suffering, some might choose to convince themselves that they are aliens, fairies, monsters or some other mythical being.   Recently, an alter told me of a brother alter who believed he was a bear. As is common for recently surfaced alters, Bear, as he called himself, was too shy to speak, but was listening. So I began gently speaking to him. I had assumed he had chosen to believe he was a bear to help himself feel safe, since few people would dare mess with a grizzly bear. After I spoke to him along those lines for a few moments he interrupted, saying that he was not an animal but was a tattered teddy bear, because, he said, “stuffed toys can’t feel.” (It is common for hurting alters to feel disconnected from their feelings and, of course, anyone who is hurting would prefer to feel unable to feel pain.)   Although in seeking comfort, certain alters might assume a false identity, their suffering and memories are real.   In the light of what we have so far discovered, it is not hard to conceive of some alters mistakenly supposing they are demons. A common reason is the low self-esteem of alters coupled with the fact that abusers often do their utmost to brainwash their victims into thinking that these innocents are “evil,” or “of the devil.” I have also heard of one alter formed in exceptional circumstances who thought he was a demon. In this case, abusers were trying to plant a real demon in the person, and having an alter capable of giving a convincing impression of a demon having been successfully planted was a clever way of foiling the abusers’ evil intention.   These exceptions aside, however, alters usually appear as human, whereas demons only sometimes pretend to be human. Demons are external beings that might enter a person and mess with one’s mind but they are no more part of the person than a leech is.   Despite it being easy to mistake some alters for demons, alters could no more be cast out than anyone’s past experiences and memories could be cast out. And because every alter has deep feelings and sensitivities and is as much a person as the host is, how an alter is treated is critical. You cannot drive alters  out , but you can drive alters  in ; forcing them deeper into a person, where they hide, reeling in the pain of being grossly misunderstood, and unwilling to risk further contact with people – even with people who have great potential to help.   Usually within just a few days of contact with a loving, accepting person, an alter will begin to heal and feel more peace and so become increasingly delightful to converse with. Even alters that initially seem obnoxious can quickly become devoted, Spirit-filled Christians, deeply in love with Jesus, and highly moral. Tragically, however, some counselors or hosts can be so hasty in misjudging alters as demons that alters withdraw in terror before these self-proclaimed experts or hosts have a chance to truly interact with them and discover how loving, spiritually enlightened and authentically Christian, alters can become.   It would be upsetting enough for someone to believe you  have  a demon, but consider how offended would you feel were someone to believe you  are  a demon! To further understand why alters panic and go into deep hiding if labeled supernaturally evil (demonic), it is critical to keep in mind – it will become even clearer as you keep reading – that alters are usually already hurting immensely and highly sensitive to perceived rejection, and fear that their former abusers’ slanderous insults that they are evil and worthless might be true. Even worse, counselors who fail to distinguish between demons and alters slip into the delusion that an alter falling into gut-wrenching silence means they have cast out a demon, thus inspiring these well-meaning but tragically mistaken “helpers” to continue their reign of terror on other innocent victims.   Counselors who don’t even believe in demons but refuse to accept the reality of alters can have a similar, dangerously negative effect.   Caution   If alters began to make their presence felt in you, fears, feelings and battles with temptation would probably resurface that you had thought you were over, but had actually been plaguing you for years in less obvious ways and for reasons you couldn’t identify. To the untrained person, this reactivation of unpleasant feelings and ungodly desires might seem undesirable but in reality it is the best thing that could ever happen. It is like a person finally discovering the cause of the poor health he has endured for years, and learning that through surgery he can enjoy health like he has never before known. Ignorance might seem like bliss because it delays the pain of surgery but it is actually a curse because it keeps the person below full health.   An inner voice was making all sorts of false accusations against Alice. By this time, Alice and I had had considerable experience with alters. Not only was this voice not one of her twenty-five alters that we had identified, it seemed quite different to any alter we had ever encountered. In fact, no new alters had surfaced in Alice for quite some time and we expected that there were no more. Along with some of Alice’s discerning alters, I was fairly sure that the source of this hate and false accusations was a demon. Nevertheless, I decided to be cautious. Rather than aggressively rebuke it as a demon, I compromised by gently affirming that Alice belonged to Jesus, and that because she had his righteousness, no accusations applied to her.   Although I affirmed the truth, I wondered if I were being a wimp for not getting more aggressive. The voice, however, soon turned out to be an alter who said she hated both God and Alice and sometimes wanted to kill people. (This was just because she was deeply hurting.) She called herself Accused because she had taken on board all the false accusations that had been hurled at her. In fact, she was so sensitive that she sometimes took even innocent remarks as accusations.   Even though I had been unaware of this alter, she had become aware of me and thought warmly towards me. Imagine the damage I would have caused had I added to this alter’s near-suicidal state by falsely accusing her of being demonic. Because I didn’t make that mistake, the alter quickly healed. She discovered that God loved her and all her hate and bitterness left.   It should be becoming progressively clearer to the reader why in the early stages of dealing with an alter – when it has had little chance to heal – it is tempting to despise the alter. Rather than joyfully embrace the healing opportunity, we can react like a sick person who thinks he would prefer the illness he is familiar with, over the unknown pain and dangers of surgery. Naturally, while a person is recovering from surgery he may temporarily feel worse than ever, but now, for the first time, full healing is on its way. People with alters have the same assurance that, despite initial discomfort, things will get better when they let Jesus minister to their alters.   To best understand D.I.D. you should keep reading. If ever a little knowledge were dangerous, it is on this important subject. There is so much more you need to know, so please proceed to the  NEXT PAGE .   What You Need to Know About Alters

Dissociative Identity Disorder Explained       When people suffer something so horrible that their mind recoils from the very thought of it, we can understand their mind trying to suppress all memory of the event. A simple blocking of the past would not work, however, if a person were continually reminded of the trauma by, for example, the trauma being repeated every few days. When the trauma is on-going, the mind has to employ a more sophisticated approach to maintaining sanity by giving itself as big a reprieve as possible whenever the trauma is not occurring. The mind divides itself so that part of it is kept unaware of the bad times. That way, whenever the bad times are not occurring, part of the mind can function without being oppressed by an awareness of the horrors that occurred yesterday nor by the paralyzing fear that the horrors might be repeated tomorrow. Additional sources of trauma can cause further fragmenting of the mind. The advantage of fragmentation is that the mind-crippling task of trying to cope with an awareness of everything at once is broken down into smaller, though still highly challenging, pieces. It is not only memories that are divided up, but with them go other intellectual abilities as well. Some abilities can be replicated in another part of the brain, just like right-handed people can further develop the side of their brain that controls their left hand so that they can write with their left hand almost as well as with their right. Not all abilities are replicated, however. Some parts of the person end up with skills that other parts do not have. As a result, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder are usually more skilled than they realize until they become fully aware of all their other parts. Previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, the newer term sounds like gobbledygook but it is actually more meaningful than it first seems. If you were suffering, you might make it more tolerable by seeking to lessen your awareness of your current situation and imagining you were somewhere nice. This is called  dissociation  and although it would not stop all pain, it is likely to genuinely help. Instead of thinking of yourself as being  somewhere  else, an alternative is to think of yourself as being  someone  else – someone who is never subjected to this distress. That is called taking on a  dissociative identity . This would become an obvious choice if, for example, you were a little child singled out for severe beatings simply because of who you are – the child of an abusive parent. This coping mechanism becomes a  disorder  – a disadvantage rather than an advantage – if part of you got trapped in that dissociative state and could not return to normality even when external circumstances become normal. Becoming permanently disconnected from part of yourself would not be because of an inadequacy in you but because of the severity and prolonged nature of the trauma you suffered and because it began in your formative years. On-going disconnection could occur if, for example, you remained too scared to let yourself remember what happened when you were in that dissociated state. Being unable to access unpleasant memories might superficially seem desirable but it is likely to keep you from ever healing from those memories. How could anyone resolve a problem that he refuses to think about? To live in denial is to let a problem grow. Moreover, you would probably lose not only access to certain memories but to skills you had developed while you were in that state and to certain intellectual potential that this part of you has. So remaining disconnected would prevent you from being as consistently skilled as you have the potential to be and keep you from accessing the full extent of your intellectual capacity. If you have Dissociative Identity Disorder, healing involves reconnecting with those parts of you that had become disconnected from you. False healing occurs if a person is still disconnected but mistakenly supposes nothing is missing, simply because the person has lost all awareness of disconnected parts. As a child’s brain grows it becomes increasingly rigid and the ability to compartmentalize itself through Dissociative Identity Disorder is lost if the process is not initiated by around about seven years of age. If someone learns the technique when young, however, the person can continue further compartmentalizing his/her brain later in life. Far from being freaks, people with D.I.D. have, from an early age, stumbled upon an ingenious mental strategy for coping with situations that are almost beyond human endurance. It is an emergency response to an extreme situation, however. There are significant disadvantages to remaining fragmented, such as the inability to simultaneously draw upon one’s full intellectual resources to solve problems and heal from trauma. Not as Weird as You Think An older term for Dissociative Identity Disorder is Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Regardless of name, its existence has been recognized by researchers at least as early as the 1800s. In a sense, we all have multiple personalities and switch between them according to our circumstances. We would act differently, for instance, in each of the following circumstances:  In the presence of a head of state  When alone with our spouse *  On a night out with the girls/guys *  When playing with children *  When depressed In other ways, too, everyone has “multiple personalities.” For example, we might say, “My heart says one thing, but my head says another.” The ability to see things from such different perspectives can be a significant asset. When indecisive, we speak of being “in two minds.” When dieting we are not sure which part of us will win – the part wanting to be thin or part wanting to keep eating. In Romans 7, Paul devoted almost an entire chapter detailing the battle within myself between the part of him wanting to obey God and the part wanting to indulge himself. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15). So having multiple personalities is not nearly as abnormal as it first seems. Moreover, dissociation is normal. In order to focus on the task at hand, all of us sometimes temporarily put unpleasant memories out of our minds, or tune out to such distractions as background noises. It is just that for some people this natural tendency is done to a greater extent. For them, shutting off awareness of certain distressing things is done so effectively that a separate consciousness forms within the person, with part of the person knowing, feeling and thinking some things that the other part does not. For further explanations, see  The Inner Child.

Explaining to a Child Alter Who He/She Is   Tell the alter:   You know that something very scary happened to you. It was such a shock that it is as if a part of you fell into a deep sleep, like sometimes happens when someone has been hit hard on the head. You are now awake, of course, but while you were sleeping another part of you stayed awake each day and kept growing. You were asleep for so long that what seems like yesterday was actually years ago. Things that you have feared have gone forever and you are now very safe.   You are now as strong as a grownup, and God – who can do anything – has become your best friend. He loves you so much and if you let him he’ll take away your pain and make you happy.   I can tell you some of the good things that have happened since you were asleep, but there is something even better. In time, you will be able to join up with the part of you that stayed awake so that all that has happened while you were sleeping will become your memories and you will be as smart as a grown up and good at all the things the awake part of you learnt while growing up.     Back

Help for People with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) Also Known as Multiple Personality Disorder (M.P.D.)     Healing and Wholeness for Alters (Alters are Also Known as Insiders) Part 2 Start at Part 1 Alters eventually need to realize that they are alters, and with some alters, the sooner they are told, the happier they will be but, as will become clearer later, one must be very prayerful about how and when to tell them.   The following is what I tell older alters, to help them understand who they are (simpler language is needed for young alters). I place it here because it might further clarify your understanding of alters. It is important to read the rest of this series of webpages, however, to understand the risks involved in revealing this information to alters too soon.   Through no fault of your own you suffered something very traumatic. It is probably your first memory. This was so upsetting that it caused a temporary form of amnesia. With this type of memory loss you don’t forget all of the past, only part of it. In fact, you recall some of the past so vividly that it seems to be much more recent than it actually is. It’s rather like being Rip Van Winkle, who slept for years and when he woke up what seemed like yesterday was actually many years ago and the world had moved on without him being aware of it. It might be, for instance, that today’s date is much later than you suppose. What year do you think this is? I can show you a calendar or newspaper to prove to you the correct date if you wish. You probably also lost memory of your life before the trauma. Even if you have a good memory up until the present, there are probably many years of childhood memories that you are currently cut off from.   You are presently conscious of an important, irreplaceable part of you, but there is more to you than you are presently aware of. You have memories that you cannot currently access because the trauma you suffered caused you to become disconnected from the rest of yourself. You disconnected in a courageous attempt to protect the rest of you from dealing with the upsetting experience you suffered, but since that event the rest of you has gained information and skills that will comfort you and allow you to heal. Though you have fractured, this brokenness can be restored. Other parts of you can tell you things about you that you currently don’t know. Better still, those memories and skills you have temporarily lost will become your very own when you reconnect with the rest of you. Other parts of you might seem like other people but they share your body.   This disconnectedness has previously caused isolated parts of you to have little awareness of you, or little understanding of who you are. This lack of understanding could have caused them to treat you with less love and respect than you deserve. If so, this is most unfortunate, and they probably already regret their mistake and as they get to know you they will certainly regret any hurt they have caused.   It is harder to put this in terms that a little child would understand but if you wish to read an attempt, see  Explaining to a child alter who he/she is.   The Horror of Being a Child Alter   It is hard to conceive of a more tortured existence than that of an alter living in an adult body and yet trapped in the years of childhood. When treated kindly and wisely, alters can find total relief, but unless they receive the attention and comfort they deserve, their pain will never end this side of the grave. Moreover, unless people with alters learn how to avoid making things worse, they will almost inevitably create still more sources of suffering for their already severely traumatized alters.   No matter how much people might despise the fact that they have alters, they must face the obvious reality that no one can have peace while a part of him/her is reeling in pain. To live in denial, and ignore the needs of one’s alters will only perpetuate, and quite possibly intensify, one’s anguish. We’ll look at how to give alters the help and comfort they need.   For insight into how much child alters typically suffer, try vividly imagining being in the following endless nightmare.   You are three years old and have not only suffered deeply damaging trauma, you are endlessly reliving it. As if this were not enough torment, you are trapped in an adult body, which results in the perpetual horror of you being as real as anyone else and yet treated as nothing. You are despised by all of the few people in the world who are vaguely aware of you, and you are sure their reaction proves you are a hideous freak.   You cannot let a single person see you play or giggle or cry. Anyone – you know of no exceptions – catching a glimpse of you acting your age will ignorantly but sincerely conclude that you are literally insane, or at the very least, abnormal. Even children think it weird to see an adult acting like a child, and children are usually quick to speak their mind. So you dare not talk to anyone or even let them chance upon seeing you act in any way that for you is natural.   You feel forced to all sorts of extremes to hide from everyone, and yet you have the desperate human need to end psychologically damaging isolation. Moreover, how can you avoid making your embarrassing presence felt? You might not even be potty trained. Imagine, if you dare, the implications of someone in an adult body having that problem.   You might not have grasped that when people see you, they see the body of an adult. (The common blindness of alters to the true nature of the body they live in is only slightly more extreme than that of a dangerously thin anorexic seeing herself as fat.) If you believe you have a child’s body when you don’t, you won’t understand people’s disgust at you acting as a child and so you will take their reaction even more personally. And if you live in the body of a menstruating woman, you will be disturbed that someone very close to you bleeds. No one has ever explained to you that this is not a life-threatening illness. If you have grasped that it is your body that is bleeding, you could be even more distressed. And having the body of a sexually mature woman might subject you to more sexual advances that terrify you.   It might be that the one person hardest to be utterly invisible to – the host person in whose adult body you live, the one who best understands you and should be your greatest ally – finds you such an embarrassment that he or she hates you and, it seems, would literally kill you, given half the chance.   You have not only a normal child’s craving for hugs and touch but your trauma accentuates this need. Nevertheless, you either find yourself in the body of a person who doesn’t get nearly the degree of touch that you as a distressed child need, or you are sentenced to live in the body of a married person who receives touch that is traumatically inappropriate for a child. More alarming still, sexual abuse is quite likely the very trauma that made you an alter in the first place.   You could find yourself repeatedly exposed to movies, conversations and behavior that might be acceptable for adults but are deeply upsetting or even terrifying for a three year old.   To magnify every source of agony: you find yourself, through no fault of your own, in the devastating predicament of being unable to grow up. This means that unless someone at last recognizes your needs and helps you mature mentally, you must suffer all this loneliness, rejection and devastatingly low self-esteem, not merely for the length of a normal childhood but for twenty, thirty, forty or more years.   It can be deeply disturbing when you finally learn that you are actually part of a much older person. Suddenly you no longer feel you know who you are. How should you act now that you know you are not really a child but you still feel like one and you still like doing what others regard as childish things? Realizing that you are decades older than you thought could mean the shattering of many cherished dreams. So much you had hoped for as a child has either already passed or you now know can never happen.   It’s not just young alters that can suffer greatly from the way their hosts and/or other people treat them. Consider, for example, an average man who has an alter who believes he is female. Imagine how that alter would be treated, both by the man and by everyone else.   Deepening our Understanding of Alters   Suppose a man suffered trauma at age two, then had a separate trauma at age five, another at six and another at age twenty. The person could have an alter formed at age two, with acute memories of traumas suffered at that age, and an additional alter at age five, another at six and another at age twenty, while yet another part of the person (usually referred to as the host) is at the man’s real age. Although an alter forms at a specific age, the alter usually has a range of memories from that time until a different trauma occurs, in which case, an additional alter could be formed and the other alter might go into hiding for decades. Alternatively, the alter could continue to come out to perform certain tasks but in go into hiding at other times.   Consider a middle aged man with an alter whose memory is limited to when he was five years old. When this alter speaks out loud, he would have to use the man’s vocal cords. Except for the sound of his voice, however, (and even that might betray subtle differences within the limitations of man’s vocal range) you would swear you were communicating with a five year old (until the alter begins to mature).   It has been said that child alters have the short attention span of a child, but there is more to it than that. Regardless of how old they were when they formed, alters may on occasion be able to tolerate only a few second’s conversation due to overwhelming feelings of confusion, anxiety or emotional (either positive or negative) overload.   Alters formed at certain times are likely to develop specific skills. So some people, though not all, have alters assigned to specific tasks. For example, one alter might almost always take over when public speaking is required, another might predominate when parenting skills are needed, and so on. Some alters might also take on specific roles in supporting fellow alters. For example, one might act as a protector, and another might bear the overflow of pain whenever other alters can tolerate no more.   Alters that have kept themselves in deep isolation usually have Rip-Van-Winkle-like memory gaps. Once they surface, however, they are capable of picking up new information and skills. Ceasing to be deeply buried is usually dependent upon them feeling safe. Once this happens it is as though they are activated. They can then be specifically addressed and taught new things. They might also happen to overhear relevant conversations that help them learn, but unless they are conversed with directly, there is no guarantee that they are listening. As an openness to the host and other alters develops, an alter broadens his or her skills and knowledge (often quite rapidly) and becomes increasingly like the full person. For example, a child alter that is accepted and understood by the host will usually mature at a much faster rate than a child would. The remarkable speed is not merely because the alter is growing up or learning new things; the alter is learning how to access the host’s mental abilities. The rigid wall between the alter and the rest of the person is coming down.   Hosts typically have a degree of control over which alters are active but their control has limits. For example, an alter might at any specific time be asleep (even though the host is awake), or might be away with God, or temporarily too traumatized to speak, or simply feel a need for time-out. Or an alter might choose to remain silent because he/she considers there is insufficient privacy or does not trust someone who might overhear him/her. On the other hand, alters sometimes manifest themselves without their host’s permission and sometimes without even the host’s knowledge. For example, to conceal their actions from their host or avoid being restrained by the host, alters sometimes deliberately put their hosts to sleep before manifesting themselves. One alter said she would achieve this by whispering repeatedly to her host, “You’re getting s-l-e-e-p-y.” Another seemed able to achieve this more rapidly and called it “pulling the plug” on the host’s consciousness.   It is desirable for hosts to emphasize to all alters that there are dangers associated with them taking over in public without checking with the host as to how safe doing so would be. Alters who have only limited experience in relating to the outside world in an adult body could drive without appropriate skills, become physically lost, get needlessly freaked out by misinterpreting someone’s actions, say inappropriate things to adults, and so on. If alters understand the need for their host’s guidance and know that the host will give them as much “body time” time (when they control the body) as practical, they will usually keep safe and not embarrass their host.   Besides differing in apparent age, alters within the same person can differ in personal tastes, abilities, character strengths, weaknesses, fears and so on. Some alters are likely to intensely dislike other alters and/or the host. That’s not surprising when we consider how many of us seem to hate ourselves, at least sometimes during our lives. Nevertheless, perceived rejection or ill-feeling between a person’s alters can be very damaging and significantly delay healing. If an alter is angry at other alters and upsetting them, it would probably be worthwhile giving that alter much attention, listening to him/her, comforting him/her, and so on. Seek to calm the alter and gradually coax the alter to be more positively disposed towards the others. Alters formed by the trauma of sexual abuse might be sexually disturbed and it is not impossible for one alter to “sexually molest” another. Alters are also able to “hit” each other and inflict what feels like physical pain. The assaults might not actually be physical but they can seem as real as nightmares seem while you are still sleeping.   My Blunders With Alters   Revealing the full truth to alters is, to say the least, a delicate matter. Even the positive aspects are mind-boggling, such as suddenly learning that dreaded events are already in the past. There are also distressing aspects, such as learning that joyfully anticipated events like graduations and parenthood have already gone. It is helpful to explain to alters that they have actually enjoyed some anticipated events and that they will gradually gain full memory of these positive events. Often, however, the truth brings the crushing news that some cherished dreams will never materialize. This news can be so traumatic that an alter could even split yet again because of it.   As God told a young alter, if anything is really lost – no matter what – God is able to make up for it seven fold. In the short term, however, this solace might seem so inadequate that alters could turn suicidal over shattered dreams, just because someone made them realize the nature of reality without adequately preparing them for it.   Since alters are already deeply hurting, conversing with alters is like massaging people who have invisible wounds randomly scattered over their body. Your massage can bring them great relief but with the slightest slip their pain will skyrocket.   I was casually talking with a friend, when suddenly an alter of hers began speaking to me for the first time ever. Eager to understand who this alter is, I asked her age. She didn’t seem to know. I asked what her earliest memories were and I couldn’t seem to get an answer. Trying to get a rough idea of her “age,” I asked if she recalled a certain key event in my friend’s life and suddenly I loathed myself, desperately wishing I could have taken back my words. I had foolishly mentioned a key but distressing event in her host’s life that this alter had been unaware of until my blunder. Yes, alters need to know everything eventually, but my timing – mentioning it as soon as she first revealed herself – was most inappropriate, and highly disturbing for the alter.   On another occasion, I tried to comfort an alter who thought she was only four but felt compelled to help her host in adult tasks that were taxing for a little child. My intentions could not have been more admirable in gently explaining that she really isn’t four, but for days this dear alter was so crushed by what she perceived as the implications, that she wished she were dead and refused to speak to me or to God, her best friend. The alter eventually came to terms with what had slipped from my mouth but my timing was particularly atrocious because right then all of the woman’s other alters were reeling with pain and confusion over another issue.   Alters’ deep fear of rejection (the consequence of very real and bitter experiences), keeps them terrified of what might happen if anyone they do not fully trust learns anything about them. In addition, they usually feel a great responsibility to do their utmost to protect the rest of the person from pain. Rightly or wrongly, this typically includes feeling obligated to keep distressing information secret from their hosts or fellow alters. So alters usually take deep offense at anyone betraying their confidence by letting slip any details about them – even their mere existence – to anyone else. Despite me knowing this, I suggested to a friend that he begin to inform his wife about alters by handing her some general information about Dissociative Identity Disorder. I thought this safe because there was nothing in the information about his own alters, nor even the suggestion that he himself had alters, but to my dismay, this simple act done without consulting his alters caused one of them to feel deeply betrayed and to be furious with his host for days.   I’ve also had two unfortunate instances stemming from not realizing who I was speaking with. In the first instance, an alter who at the time was completely unknown to me was tentatively reaching out to me while pretending to be another alter. The other time, I assumed I was communicating with the host when it was actually a recently-surfaced alter.   It is common for alters not to identify themselves, sometimes because they are shy and sometimes simply because they don’t consider how difficult it is for people to distinguish between alters who share the same body and vocal cords. The problem is that a person’s alters usually differ markedly from each other. An alter who believes she is three will think and act very differently to an alter formed as a teenager who, in turn, will differ greatly from a middle-aged host. Likewise, an alter who has only recently surfaced will be very different to one who has traveled much further on the healing journey. These differences mean that the same behavior that would represent a praiseworthy advance for one alter might indicate a disappointing regression if displayed by another alter.   We instinctively adjust our expectations according to who we believe we are talking to. If someone is acting more childlike or less intelligent or less Christian than we have come to expect for that person, we are likely to register our surprise with a mild rebuke or remark that the alter we think we are talking to would take in his or her stride but could deeply wound an alter who is at a very different stage of the healing journey.   Alters need to know that failing to identify themselves, rather than being the extra-safe way of testing the waters that they suppose, is the very thing that exposes them to the greatest danger of getting hurt. They will inevitably do it from time to time, however, even if merely because they forget that it is not obvious to others which alter is speaking.   In the worst of my blunders, alters recovered within a few days. The alters later said that the fact that they knew I genuinely cared for them helped them forgive me. Writes one of them:   Yes, people make mistakes, but once we alters understand that this is very hard, not just on us but on you, we can help you deal with the challenges as you help us deal with our pain.   But though I used to pride myself in being tactful and considerate, I quickly discovered that alters are so hyper-sensitive that my best attempts to help are like trying to trim toenails with a chainsaw.   Alters desperately need help. Doing nothing could be more cruel and dangerous than the most serious blunder. So caving into the difficulties and giving up trying to help alters is not a compassionate option. The need for courage in befriending alters is as immense as the need for superhuman wisdom.   Even the famous counselor, teacher and author, Dr. Neil T Anderson, writes in his book  Set Free  (page 219) about the most basic aspect of ministering to alters – distinguishing alters from demons:   Sometimes it is difficult even if you have a lot of experience and spiritual discernment. Even the most experienced and mature people can be deceived. I certainly have been.   Since I have yet to find an infallible therapist to whom I could relinquish the task, I can only pray more, and trust myself less, and lean heavily upon God. Here’s a Scripture everyone relating to alters needs to pray often:   Psalms 141:3  Set a guard over my mouth, O LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips.   Jesus: the Perfect Alter   An alter told one of Jake’s alters:   You exist as a separate part of Jake because Jake was pushed beyond human endurance. Then you come along like a lifeboat. You were loaded up with pain and set to sail. So was I. It wasn’t our fault.   This almost exactly describes the role of a scapegoat. The term “scapegoat” has entered everyday speech via the Old Testament. It has surprisingly much to tell us. Once a year, to atone for sin, two goats were chosen. One of them was sacrificed, paying the ultimate price for the nation’s sins. Of course, most of the nation’s sins were essentially average and yet in the final analysis each sin took no less than the death penalty for the blame to be fully resolved and extinguished. The remaining goat – called the scapegoat – stayed alive. Like the other goat, it was utterly innocent of any human sin, but after the sacrificial death of the other one, the sins of the entire nation were symbolically placed on its head and it was driven into the desert, symbolically taking the sins away from the people, never to be seen again (Leviticus 16:5-22).   Animal sacrifices, though hopelessly inadequate to resolve our guilt problems, were divinely instituted to point prophetically to the one sacrifice that can meet our souls’ deepest needs. The sacrifice to end all sacrifices would have to be human, since it is humans who are blameworthy. But to end all blame, the perfect sacrificial victim would, like the goats, have to be utterly blameless. Unless he had absolute moral perfection – like no other human the world has ever seen – a human sacrifice would be worthless. Since anyone who sins deserves to die, if any of us were to volunteer as a sacrifice we would only be suffering what we ourselves deserve, not suffering for the sins of others. The only perfect sacrifice is the One of whom John the Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”   The entire Old Testament sacrificial system was ordained by God to prepare his people for the Savior of the world so that they would understand what our Lord achieved by dying on the cross. He is the embodiment and fulfillment of the whole Jewish sacrificial system. So when God instituted the use of a scapegoat, he was helping his people understand Jesus, who is the ultimate scapegoat.   That  two  goats were needed to atone for the nation’s sins – one dying and then the other released alive – points not only to the removal of our sins but to the death and the subsequent resurrection of Jesus. Not just Jesus’ death but also his resurrection were needed to resolve utterly the guilt and eternal consequences of humanity’s offenses. Just as Jesus rose to a new life, so he has the power to give us a new life, after fully extinguishing all of our blame and shame.   Humanity’s only true Innocent took upon himself all the blame, letting himself be stripped naked and abused to death so that you could have his peace and purity, and rise with him to a breathtakingly new life that begins here and now.   I am frequently deeply moved by the selfless, sacrificial way in which alters voluntarily take hurts and rejection upon themselves in order to protect the rest of the person. Like the perfect alter, Jesus wants to take upon himself all the guilt, all the horror, and all the shame you have ever suffered. He wants every trace of filth and pain and rejection to be dumped on him until it kills him, because in killing him, its power to hurt you is also killed.   If you were living in ancient Israel, it would not just be  your  sin that was symbolically placed on the scapegoat, but the sins of the entire nation. Even more astounding, the sins of the entire world were actually placed on Jesus when he agonized on the cross. This is significant. Usually, alters hurt, not because of their own sin, nor even the sin of their host, but because of the sins of an abuser or some other cruel person. There is no need even to work out exactly who is at fault and to what degree, however, because  all  the sin and  all  the blame and shame were put on the ultimate Scapegoat. Alters do the best they can but no alter can totally remove all blame, shame and pain. The host still feels some of it. And even if an alter could perfectly achieve full peace for the host, what about the alter? What can be done to relieve the alter’s own suffering?   We have noted that the pain an alter bears is almost never the alter’s fault. The source of the hurt is the sins of others, and he/she bears the pain, sacrificing his/her own well-being for the sake of the host. This is Jesus’ role. Being God, he – and he alone – can do it to perfection. And he does it for all of humanity. For an alter to hold on to the pain is to suffer unnecessarily (which would break God’s heart) and to render Jesus’ torturous death a waste, as far as both the alter and host are concerned.   Dumping pain upon an innocent alter is an act of desperation that can keep a person alive until he/she finds God’s perfect remedy: Jesus. Asking an alter to bear pain is at best an emergency measure only. Like putting chewing gum on a leaking fuel tank, as a tiny aircraft is in flight, it could save someone temporarily, but something more effective needs to be done as soon as possible. It is vital that alters be relieved of their pain as quickly as possible, both for their sake and so that their hosts can receive full healing.   Jesus is the alter  par excellence ; literally the alter’s alter. For both the host and all alters, Jesus bore all the horrific consequences of sin, completely removing all the blame, pain and shame, destroying it all by his own death, so that none of it could ever come back to hurt the host or any of the alters.   Please don’t let familiarity with the following Scripture rob you of its full impact. Read slowly and prayerfully what it says of Jesus, the perfect alter:   Isaiah 53:3-6  He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.   Jesus took upon himself full punishment for every sin that has ever been committed. He was betrayed, disowned, spat on, stripped naked, made a public spectacle of, shamed, laughed at, degraded, slapped, punched, flayed alive, spiritually cursed (Galatians 3:13), rejected by his people and by God (Mark 15:34), tortured to death for  you . He bore  your  rejection,  your  heartache,  your  humiliation. For you, he took the pain, the shame and the blame.   God’s plan has always been that we offload our pain on to him, not upon an alter.   1 Peter 5:7  Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.   Psalms 55:22  Cast your cares on the LORD and he will sustain you . . .   When alters were formed, the host did not understand the implications of this truth, but now it can be explained to alters so that they can be relieved of all their torment by handing over to the Lord their pain, distress, and secrets, letting the Lord of glory, who lovingly volunteered to be humanity’s scapegoat, bear it all on the cross and annihilate it with his own death. Then alters can be free to enjoy life and can help hurting parts of their host, not by personally bearing hurts and secrets, but by encouraging fellow alters to lay all their pains and burdensome secrets upon the crucified Lord and rise in the triumphant new life of our resurrected Lord.   Healing your Alter   Every reader will benefit from the next few paragraphs, but in particular I would like to address every reader who has Dissociative Identity Disorder.   1 Corinthians 6:17  But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.   Ephesians 5:30  for we are members of his body.   John 15:4-5  . . . No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.   Just as an alter and host are an inseparable part of each other, Jesus is an essential part of every true Christian. And just as an alter endeavors to remove pain from him/her host, Jesus longs to remove your pain. Infinitely more effective than any alter, however, Jesus has the power to fully absorb and kill in his own body every sinful act that has ever hurt you.   Sin is the issue because anyone hurting or violating you has violated God’s loving laws and sinned against someone God passionately loves – you. The Bible uses various word pictures to portray how utterly Jesus will remove from you the sins that have hurt you. In an era when ocean depths were as inaccessible as the furthest star, Scripture speaks of God burying sin in the deepest sea (Micah 7:19). In another part, it speaks of sin being removed as far as the east is from the west (Psalms 103:12).   The ultimate Scapegoat longs to put an infinity between you and everything that has ever hurt you. However, because God is not a thief and is the exact opposite of an abuser, his lofty morality and deep respect for you compels him to hold back until you give him full permission to take your pain from you. And because God is a God of love and truth, he cannot operate in an atmosphere of denial and mistrust. He waits to be welcomed into your deepest secrets and pains so that he can do what he yearns to do – gently and lovingly remove everything that is hurting you.   Of course, the Almighty already knows everything that has happened to you, and every good and bad way you have responded. Not only will he not be offended or shocked, he will cherish you sharing with him painful, frightening or disgusting things that are so significant to you that you find them hard to speak about. Because he loves you unreservedly in utter purity, unselfishness and respect for you, God treasures you telling him all about these things. He esteems you sharing the intimate details as proof of your love and trust.   Not only does the Lord have every answer you desperately need, he is tender and gentle. He reels in pain when you suffer needlessly by you holding on to burdens and distress that Jesus has already suffered to make their removal possible. Christ exposes his heart when he cried, “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34). He agonizes for you, yearning for you to stop living in denial or backing off from his tender compassion.   I know it takes great courage for you to hand your secrets over to him. You’ve been let down and ridiculed by people for as long as you can remember. You fear God might be like all those other humans, but wait a moment: God isn’t human. His warm, personal love and tender devotion and faithfulness to you is flawless. He has none of the sinful, selfish, fickle ways of the people who have hurt you. Make Jesus’ day: let him extinguish in his own tortured body your burning grief and pain.   If it were with any pride that I told Alice’s alter of my new revelation about Jesus being the alter’s alter, it was short-lived. It turned out that God had already told her that a couple of days earlier. In yet another e-mail to one of Jake’s alters, she wrote:   I was sitting on the sofa this morning reading in the Bible about Jesus’ death when Jesus appeared and knelt down in front of me. He pointed out that his torture lasted all night. He was naked, he was beaten, he was rejected and shamed. They mocked his body.   I asked him if any of his suffering was sexual. He said, “I was a naked target. What do you think?”   He was betrayed and hurt beyond words. His friends denied him. They were ashamed of him. He was sold for money to be tortured.   Jesus leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “I know.” He let those words sink in. “I know all the pain you have suffered and I have been through it.”   He is holy and glorified. He has won and he knows the way to victory. His scars are a badge of honor that he took that pain. Just as we took the pain so that our host could move on, Jesus took the pain so that we can move on. He is our alter. I don’t feel alone and scared anymore. I have an alter to bear my pain.   Being pain-free is really wonderful. When two of Alices’ other alters got upset recently, I wasn’t so full of pain that I couldn’t help them. I was able to bring them to Jesus. It was amazing.   This dear alter is finding increasing fulfillment in using her insights gained as an alter to minister in the power of Christ to other alters. Interestingly, her host has an intercessory calling upon her life. True intercessors sometimes feel intensely the pain of others but they don’t hold on to the pain. Their privileged task is to bring that pain to Christ and leave the pain with the One who suffered to set people free.   When we are in too much pain to think straight, we long for a quick fix in which all memory of painful events vanishes. Nevertheless, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder know that this simply does not work. They tried to kill memories and some almost seemed to achieve it for a while, but it brought them no real peace. We need to be free from pain but we need to retain our dignity and humanity by being able to mentally come to terms with the experience.   Moreover, for the memory to disappear would render all our past tragedies a useless waste. Our tears are too precious to God for him to let them be shed in vain. He longs not only to remove our pain but to transform our past suffering into something valuable, even as Jesus’ suffering is of inestimable value. People who have let God heal them of Dissociative Identity Disorder find themselves uniquely placed to understand the power and compassion of God and to bring this tender love and healing to other hurting people. They find themselves co-laborers with Almighty God, doing things of eternal significance for people who are of infinite value to the God of love. They know that their past tragedies have uniquely empowered them for this intensely fulfilling privilege and they will spend eternity in awe at how God turned something that hurt God horrifically – your own suffering – into something that brings them endless glory.   Various Types of Alters   I will not attempt to categorize every possible type, but awareness of certain types of alters can significantly speed healing. Not everyone with D.I.D. has every type mentioned below, but being aware of the possibility could enable you to discover and help such an alter much quicker.   Protector Alters   Protector alters shield other alters by putting on a tough front and trying to force to back down anyone they see as a threat. Tragically, they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which causes them to often see danger where there is none. The easiest understood instance of PTSD is a soldier who upon returning from the front line to the safety of home is still on hyper-alert, unable to sleep property, diving for cover whenever a car backfires, and so on.   So protector alters are hyper-vigilant and much more suspicious than current circumstances require. The alters the protector seek to shield usually accept the protector’s assessment of danger, and even if they do not, the protector still usually tries to get them into hiding at the first perception of danger.   Unfortunately, protectors often hinder healing by assessing counselors as threats. They can also perceive their host as a threat and so keep alters and/or information hidden from their host. A host can be perceived as a threat if he/she might blab things the protector believe should be kept secret or if the host is not cautious enough, and so on.   Even though these dear alters might initially hinder – or even sabotage – the healing process, they are not enemies. Even if their help is sometimes misguided, they are highly traumatized, self-sacrificing alters courageously trying their utmost to keep the person safe.   Do all you can to work with, rather than against, a protector. Continually strive to get the protector on-side and to allay all the protector’s concerns. Even empower the protector, giving him/her right of veto.   As the protector gradually learns to trust you, much progress can be made in discovering other alters. Once on board, protectors are very valuable allies in the healing process.   Sleeper Alters   You have probably heard of sleeper spies or terrorist cells that remain inactive for years until they are needed. Some people have certain alters like this. They remain inactive – sometimes for many years – until a crisis alerts them that they are needed and then they come to the fore. They can use various means to alert them of a crisis. It might, for example, be whenever a person engages in more self-harm than usual. Another way is to be particularly close to a certain alter and be activated when that alter is particularly distressed.   Some of these alters are helper alters that support alters when things become unbearable for one of them. (By coming to the rescue they might sometimes prevent the formation of a new alter.) Other sleeper alters are protectors who are quite strong and can take the person over almost completely during a supposed crisis.   Being sleeper alters means that they are likely to have been somewhat out of the loop while the rest of the person has been healing and so they might be less in possession of all the relevant facts than some other alters. Even more confusing is that in order to exercise the authority they feel the emergency demands, they might pretend to be another well-liked or powerful alter. The result can be very confusing for the rest of the person.   So if a person suddenly starts acting out of character, a sleeper alter might be the reason.   The difficulties in helping sleeper alters are obvious when you consider that since the very nature of a sleeper alter is to remain hidden until an emergency, they appear only rarely. Moreover they see their key function as supporting/protecting the person  by  remaining hidden and unconnected most of the time, so even if discovered, they feel the need to return to hiding.   Obviously, it is very important to try to convince a sleeper alter that it is now safe to remain out of hiding indefinitely. Such alters usually find not returning to hiding very scary, however, and can feel that by remaining out they are being unfaithful to their role and letting the whole person down. The easiest way I have found to break this is for the alter to fall in love with his/her marriage partner. They crave love and understanding so much that when they find it, they will be very reluctant to lose it again by going back to “sleep.” Another possibility is for other alters to give the new alter lots of love, understanding and comfort. Of course, the ultimate counselor remains Jesus. Encourage alters to let Jesus share his heart with them. He will reassure them.   Abusive Alters   Often when one takes the time to get to know an alter who is being harsh to fellow alters or hurting them or even sexually abusing them, it turns out that they actually believe they are helping. They might think, for example, that they are toughening up the alters, thus making them less vulnerable to abuse. Or, in the hope of saving the person from even worse abuse, they might enforce an abuser’s oppressive rules about never crying, or punishing them for doing anything the abuser might object to. Often the abusive alter is unaware that the abuser no longer has access to them and so the alter continues the oppression when there is no longer the slightest need.   As always, it is important to try to understand what motivates an alter and to gently help the alter see through any misconceptions the alter has.   Introjects   An introject is a rather amazing type of abuser alter. Until the misconception is exposed, an introject not only acts  like  an external person the survivor knew, but every alter within the survivor – including the introject alter – actually believes that this alter is not an alter but is the real external person. At first, this seems astounding but it is consistent with the wide range of different things that alters can think themselves, including animals, aliens and so on.   Often that external person is someone who abused the person who has this alter. Even though not all external abusers realize it, this type of introject alter enforces the external abuser’s wishes upon the alters when the abuser is absent. In fact, it can continue even after the abuser had died. Some introjects actually report back to the abuser as informers.   Not surprisingly, introjects have themselves suffered immensely.   It is important to bring introject alters to the point where they finally realize they are part of the abuse survivor and not part of the external abuser. Helping them discover the current date and that they are in the body of someone other than the abuser can help. Once introjects become loyal to the survivor, the person’s safety is significantly enhanced. I suggest you do not get sidetracked now but elsewhere on this website I have a detailed record of counseling an introject.   Unique Challenges in Helping Alters   *  Just because an alter was formed at a certain age does not mean that the alter has all the skills normally associated with that age. For example, it is quite possible for an alter of an excellent reader to be formed in her twenties and yet be unable to read.   *  Even though you could be focusing exclusively on one alter or the host, you must always remain alert to the possibility that other alters could be overhearing or observing.   *  Usually a significant factor in the formation of alters is that the host had no one who would sympathize with him/her. Any feeling of isolation and rejection at their very formation is often magnified still further by the way alters are subsequently treated even by their own host, who usually has had no training in understanding alters. All of this would be enough to make almost anyone feel suicidal and to feel he/she is “nothing.” But on top of this, alters can mistakenly suppose that being an alter means they are less than human and almost literally “nothing.”   Even if they don’t think they are toys, animals, aliens or demons, it is common for alters to doubt that they are fully human. Many factors contribute to this. For example, our emotions are a significant part of our humanity, and alters are commonly in so much pain that they are largely dissociated from their feelings and emotions. They can feel more like zombies than normal people. Moreover, alters are often formed as a result of being treated callously, as though they were less than human. In addition, to admit to oneself that one is human is to raise one’s hopes of being treated with dignity and respect and perhaps even love. Most alters’ experience affirms that this is unlikely and that it is less painful never to get one’s hopes up by letting oneself think one is human.   I discovered another significant factor in alters feeling less than human when I wrote on friendship greeting cards and posted them to some of Alice’s alters. When I had only been aware of a few of Alice’s alters I was better able to give them individual attention, but it grew harder when many more appeared in fairly rapid succession. One day, the alter I had known for the longest time suggested that I give a greeting card to one of two troubled alters. She said that giving them something tangible would be beneficial. I decided to buy many cards that were each different, address each one to a different alter, and write a unique, personal message on each card, affirming my appreciation of that alter. Their excitement over receiving their own greeting card far exceeded my expectations.   I had often spoken individually to each alter, so I was surprised that the cards would have such a powerful effect on them. Then I realized that most of these alters had not only never in their lives personally received the smallest of gifts, most had not even one item that they could call their own. I ask hosts to think hard about how they might correct this.   Until I came along, these alters had been in such isolation that they rarely interacted with people and often had not even had a name, much less had been addressed by name. Being continually and solely treated like this would be highly dehumanizing for anyone. Giving each of them a little gift was another significant step in affirming to them that they are truly real and not, as some people think, a figment of the imagination.   Time and again, I have found that a significant aspect of healing involves alters having their humanity affirmed. It is obviously psychologically unhealthy – depressing at the very least – for a person to feel less than human. Likewise, it is unhealthy for people to have any  part  of them that feels not human or less than human. For a person to be in his or her prime, each part of the full person needs to be psychologically and spiritually in top condition.   It is tempting to fear that affirming each alter’s existence and individuality would perpetuate a person’s fracturedness. Consider, however, how restoring each individual part of a machine to full strength and pristine condition would cause the entire machine to function so much better. In fact, fully restored parts fit together better than rusted parts. Likewise, if an alter is empowered to be strong, confident and enjoy life, the entire person will benefit. Moreover, confident, assertive alters feel more empowered to share their secrets, thus breaking down the walls that keep a person fractured.   Over and over, as I have affirmed alters, building up their self-confidence and relationship with God, I have seen them develop all sorts of unexpected abilities that have immensely benefited the entire person. D.I.D. exists because of burying things and avoiding issues. The last thing you want is to further bury things. You want to heal, not perpetuate the pain and disfunction.   So I firmly believe that it is important for alters to realize that they are very lovable, deeply loved by God and are fully human. Let’s briefly examine the issue of their humanity.   Even though there is more to your life than just a portion of your life experiences and memories, you were fully human throughout every experience and memory you had. Suppose a hit on your head caused you to forget most of your past and you could otherwise function fairly normally. Would that make you cease to be human? Likewise, although alters have a portion, and not all, of a person’s life experiences, memories, feelings, reactions and thoughts, they are fully human. Just as we are real humans despite the fact that none of us can consciously recall every experience and thought that we have ever had, so alters are really human, even though an alter is not aware of everything that happened to the person.   Someone with alters who was trying to live in denial told me, “It’s not like alters are real flesh and blood . . .”   I replied, “Alters do have flesh and blood. The body you call your own is as much theirs as yours.”   A man told me about an alter of his that had just recently surfaced. “He is kind of a goofball,” he said. “He does not know his name or age.” My heart sank. Hopefully, as reader of these webpages, you have been so alerted to the sensitivities of alters that you would never use such an insulting name when speaking about alters, especially when they might overhear. In actual fact, if alters first reveal themselves after some alters have already been helped, it is common for them to have overheard conversations and to have grasped from this that they are not the age that they had previously thought they were. Coming to terms with this is confusing for an alter but the dawning of an awareness of an age discrepancy is a sign of intelligence, not stupidity.   Let’s continue listing unique challenges in helping alters:   *  We have seen that whenever an alter faces a new trauma, another split is likely to occur. If the previous alter then goes into deep hiding, it is akin to death for the alter, in that often the alter ceases to develop or have much in the way of new experiences and it is left behind in a time warp. But the rest of the person continues to progress. For at least one alter I’ve met, this perceived similarity between going into long term hiding and physical death made it hard for her to grasp emotionally (even though she knew it intellectually) that to kill herself by actually committing suicide is more serious than her “killing” herself simply by going into hiding. It only barely registered in her consciousness that killing her body would kill the host and all the alters. She at least realized that she shared the one body with her host and all the alters. When alters are just beginning to understand who they are, they usually have no conception at all that their bodies are also their hosts’ bodies. There are obvious dangers in regarding suicide as less serious than it really is. If you come across a suicidal alter, in addition to the usual support, ensure that the alter knows that his/her death would kill not just the alter but the host and other alters.   *  The fact that alters were created because of the need to deal with severe inner pain can leave some alters scared to let go of pain (to experience full inner healing). They fear that without the pain they would either cease to exist or their reason for living would cease. Obviously, this misconception would need to be addressed in order for alters not to sabotage their own healing.   *  A woman was in love and wanted to marry. Her little five-year-old alter also loved the man and wanted the marriage. I was concerned. It is obviously inappropriate for a child to be exposed to marital relations, and even more so for a little alter who had been formed precisely because of the horror of sexual abuse.   The little alter affirmed to me that she knew that married people liked doing things to each other that she didn’t want. I asked her how she would handle that situation.   “I’d just go off and play with God,” she said.“But how would you know when it is safe to return?”“I’d just ask God,” she replied, full of confidence.“But you deserve lots of hugs, too,” I said.“I get lots of hugs from God,” she replied.   It was quite a while before they married and by then things had radically changed. For his own personal reasons, not related to her at all, her fiancé announced that he wanted to take things very slowly after the wedding and delay consummating the marriage for weeks. By the time the wedding was approaching, however, their fiancé’s plan was too slow for them. The alters had so healed that even those aged three were begging God that as soon as it were morally acceptable they be allowed to go further sexually than their fiancé intended so quickly after marriage. A significant factor in this change was all the alters growing very close to each other, enabling the younger ones to learn from the much older ones about the positive aspects of sex. The other important factor is that they felt totally free from pressure. They knew they could withhold sex and still enjoy this man’s unconditional love. His selfless love filled them with a desire to pour out their love upon him.   Moreover, after a few months an alter surfaced for the first time while the couple were making love. This was not because the alter was triggered but because she found it so pleasurable. It affirmed to the alter that life was worth living. Not long afterwards another alter surfaced during lovemaking. This one had thought she was dead but the pleasure she had felt during lovemaking affirmed to her that she was alive. Later, still more new alters were, as it were, pleasantly awakened from sleep through lovemaking. These alters quickly discovered they were now much older and married. They healed rapidly because by now the host had many alters who knew the ropes and were able to quickly teach the new ones such things as how to access the memories of other alters. It was a joy to see how painless this whole process was for them, in huge contrast to the slow, agonizing progress that healing had been for the first alters to surface.   Another woman writes:   Once, before I knew about D.I.D. but after God had begun talking to me about inner child parts, I was moving towards an intimate encounter with my husband and started to panic inside. Realizing this might be a reaction from child parts, I felt led to say, “It’s okay. I’m an adult. I’m married, and it’s okay for this to happen. I don’t mind.” They seemed confused and shocked, questioning, “Really? Are you sure it’s okay?”   “Yes, it really is,” I replied. “So you can just go play now or something.”   “Well, if your really sure . . .” came the response.   Then another part – a young girl – gently ushered them away.   Alters require time to develop the level of confidence in God and in her future husband that this alter displayed, but it certainly opened my eyes as to what is possible. The only problem I could foresee is that her host’s husband would need to avoid being overly spontaneous by giving the alter no warning before doing something that would be inappropriate in a presence of a little girl. I presume the same principle could apply if an adult wanted to see or read something that could disturb a tiny alter.   Wherever practical, however, the ideal is to wait until all alters who believe they are children mature. This should in no way be enforced upon them but it might take as little as just a few months if they get lots of support in their healing.   *  If alters no longer feel it is safe to reveal themselves to you, they will go quiet. If they suspect you will reject, despise or criticize them, you will not hear from them. They will likewise clam up if they suspect you will expose them or betray them by telling their secrets to someone they do not, as yet, trust. If you do not realize this, and you have alters, you will wrongly conclude from their silence that you do not have alters or that they have now gone or integrated with you.   *  To someone unsure as to how to talk to her own alters, Alice wrote:   I asked my alters (who are now very chatty) what helped them open up. They said they loved being read to. (Reading out loud has loads of benefits anyway and helps me greatly with public speaking). In a story, they would feel what the characters were feeling. I used books with non-threatening stories. If one of the story characters was sad and an alter could relate, I’d stop reading and let her/me cry. It was a safe way for alters to express feelings, without directly connecting with their own pain.   I suggest a children’s book or a book about children. Young alters can relate to children. Animal stories were also a big way for my alters to express themselves. I cried through the book,  Holes . It really touched their fears of injustice. The movie  Second Hand Lions  was brilliant for them. They laughed, cried and didn’t feel alone.   At the end of this webseries is a link to a couple of short Christian stories written especially for young alters.   *  Although it is common to suppose that all alters have been identified when there are still some in hiding, it is also possible to suppose there are more alters than there really are. “I’m hiding another alter,” lied a female alter. She did this because if she were rejected because of what she then revealed, only this non-existent alter would be rejected. She could continue to converse with me on other subjects.   *  Yet another challenge unique to alters is that timid alters typically sleep during the day (when they find things the most stressful) and come out late at night when everyone else (host included) is asleep. It would therefore be productive for counselors to regularly phone late at night but this is obviously very draining for the counselor and largely impractical.

Psychological Tests to Diagnose Dissociative Identity Disorder   Official Medical (Psychiatric) Diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (M.P.D.)     As tools to speed their understanding of individuals, psychologists have developed a wide range of questionnaire-type tests. IQ tests are a well-known example. Among the many tests are ones designed to diagnose Dissociative Identity Disorder (also known by the older term of Multiple Personality Disorder). I would not regard any test as infallible but much care has been taken in developing the tests and the more they are used in conjunction with each other, the more reliable they are.     Note:  Free, on-line tests exist but they are  highly unreliable and not recommended. The following information has been kindly provided by a professional who herself has D.I.D. She is in the U.S.A. and her information applies to that country.   These tests need to be administered by a PhD level Psychologist or other Mental Health Provider (regulations differ from state to state in the US). This is because considerable skill is needed for accurate interpretation of the results. The further removed in culture the person taking the test is from a white, middle class American, the more care is required to interpret the results and the less reliable it is likely to be. Greater accuracy is believed to occur if a professional asks the questions, rather than it being reduced to a pen and paper test. The more tests that are used, the more likely it is that the final result is valid. The tester also needs to be comfortable with the fact that Christians believe it is not unusual to contact angels, demons and God. Otherwise some of the answers could be wrongly interpreted as psychosis or deliberate fabrication.   The larger and more valid tests usually cost several hundreds of dollars ($250–$500+) and unless there is a competent physician who understands the testing and there is a good reason for doing the testing (not just for curiosity’s sake or personal confirmation), most insurance companies do not cover the cost. Also, the tests themselves can be very triggering and can cause some distress.   Another important consideration is who will be seeing the results and what they will be used for. Confidentiality is a  must . Professionals understand the importance of confidentiality but it is worth asking about the office procedures regarding handling of client files and who will see your information and for what purpose.   No one should intimidate you into doing anything you feel uncomfortable about. If you feel your questions and concerns are not being given adequate attention, end the appointment and seek someone who will give you the care and respect you deserve.   You have a right to have the test administered in as comfortable an environment as possible where privacy can be maintained. It is your right to view the results of the testing – usually through a summary written by the professional – and have it explained in a non-intimidating, non-judgmental, confidential manner. Furthermore, you have a right to a copy of the summary and to ask for a second opinion.   Tests occasionally undergo revisions that further increase their accuracy. Occasionally, practitioners buy in bulk and could have old stock. It might be worthwhile asking if the lastest revision is being used.   Here are the tests, ranked approximately from the most useful/important for D.I.D. diagnosis down to the least important:   1.     MMPI-2-RF:  Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory   A 338 item tester administered “inventory” which is a standard in many psychological circles to help in the “correct” diagnosis of an individual. Some of the conditions that it can help interpret are schizophrenia, depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, dissociation, and a host of other personality/behavior disorders.   This is usually used in conjunction with MCMI-II (see 6. below) but if cost prevents this, MMPI-2-RF alone is still better than not using this test.   2.     SCID-D-R:  Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders–Revised   A 250 item “interview” meaning it is tester administered face-to-face in question/answer format.   3.     MID:  Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation   A 218 question self-reporting measure.   4.     DAPS:  The Detailed Assessment of Posttraumatic Stress   A 105-item inventory that provides detailed information on an adult client’s history of various types of trauma exposure and their psychological reactions to the trauma including dissociation.   5.     DES-II:  Dissociative Experiences Scale   A 28 item self-reporting measure.   6.     MCMI-II:  Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory   This, along with the Rorschach (“ink-blot” test) and TAT (Thematic Apperception Test – consists of 20 drawings) can provide information regarding various ways that a person interprets information and understands the world around them. The Rorschach and TAT tests are especially subjective in nature.   7.     MDI:  Multi-Scale Dissociation Inventory   A 30 item self reporting measure of the individual’s dissociative symptoms.   8.     PAS:  Perceptual Alterations Scale   A 35 item self-reporting measure.   9.     QED:  Questionnaire on Experiences of Dissociation   A 26 item self-reporting measure. A good provider may also administer an Intelligence test such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III) which can screen for and differentiate psychosis from dissociation, as sometimes DID is misunderstood as a psychotic disorder.   “ God is the center and source for all healing ,” writes the abuse survivor recovering from D.I.D. who compiled this page. Never forget this, even if you receive some help from professionals.   For self-diagnosis and indicators suggesting Dissociative Identity Disorder, understand that  alter  is a term for a separate “personality” associated with D.I.D., and see  How Can You Know if You Have an Alter?

Pride vs Humility   False Humility Exposed   The Difference Between Faith in God and Faith in Self   As affirmed in Ephesians 2:8, we are born again by grace (God taking the initiative and offering us what we don’t deserve) and we receive this by faith (trusting God to cleanse us from our sin and give us spiritual life through Jesus’ sacrificial death).   Paul agonized over the Galatian church because although they knew their spiritual life commenced through faith, they were beginning to think that the way to proceed to spiritual maturity was through their own effort. As he says in Romans 1:17 ‘For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last . . .’   The following is a relevant extract from my web book Waiting for Your Ministry and another of my webpages.     Glorious Failure   Moses was in ‘the backside of the desert,’ says the King James Bible (Exodus 3:1). I’d steer clear of that expression, but there might have been times when Moses was tempted to use it. The desert drop-out stood before the burning bush a broken man, haunted by his inadequacy (Exodus 4:10-14). He was so long in the tooth ivory hunters must have started asking after his health. And excuses! When God called him, this word-masher’s comeback was packed with more ‘buts’ than a church pew on Easter morning. As he tried to stammer home his point he even had the audacity to imply that his deficiencies were bigger than God. What’s a stutter to the One who fashions mouths? What’s a mental block to the Maker of minds?   Poor old tongue-twister – one foot in the grave, and the other in his mouth. Yet it was Moses the word-slurping geriatric, not Moses the headstrong royal, who was on the brink of greatness.   Forty years earlier, fresh from his Egyptian education, strong in body, high in status and political pull, he was keen to help God’s people. But heaven had no use for a budding superstar. Heaven was waiting for a bumbling sheep-minder.   Viewed from the final side of the grave, everything tackled in one’s own strength fizzles (Compare John 15:5). Only through God could Moses’ splash in time ripple for all eternity. Perhaps it took the full forty years for this realization to become an unshakeable conviction, but it was worth the wait. It became the secret of Moses’ strength, ridding him of the arrogant independence that would otherwise have fouled his service. He was the meekest man on earth (Numbers 12:3 ff). This precious quality is adorned with exquisite promises.   ‘The meek will he guide . . . The meek will he teach his way.’ (Psalm 25:9)   ‘The meek will increase their joy in the Lord.’ (Isaiah 29:19)   ‘The meek will inherit the earth.’ (Matthew 5:5)   Humility – joyous dependence upon the Lord – is the road to honor (Proverbs 15:33 b; James 4:10; 1 Peter 5:6-7). The glitter at the end of other roads is a mirage (Luke 14:11; Proverbs 16:25).   There was a young man with rashes; All that he touched turned to ashes. Yet marigolds, azaleas, Lily bulbs, and dahlias, All grew in those wonderful ashes.   (If you wrote poetry like this, you’d be humble, too.)   The issue of pride and humility is a deathtrap, strewn with confusion and false concepts. Let’s clear this minefield before anyone else is hurt. We’ll begin with the analogy of a lamb in Bible times.   There’s a pride that says, ‘I can find better pasture than the Shepherd. I’ll always find water. I can handle bears, and lions are probably a myth invented by the Shepherd so he can dominate me.’   Few of us are in danger of such stupidity. Our danger is the independent spirit that says, ‘I adore my wonderful Shepherd, but that grass over the rise looks particularly juicy. I’ll just wander over. I’m growing up. I’ve been out of sight before and everything went fine. If a lion comes I’m sure I can bleat loud enough and the Shepherd can run fast enough . . .’   There’s an attitude masquerading as humility that beats itself miserable. ‘I’m dumb. I’m ugly. I’m hopeless.’ Give no room to this imposter. But there’s a humility that rejoices in the certainty that the Shepherd knows best. Having abandoned faith in itself or in luck, it puts all its hope in the Shepherd, believing that to leave him out of sight for a second is to flirt with disaster. This virtue hugs the Shepherd, delighting in his every whisper, feasting on his goodness. Sometimes humility is led over rocky terrain but ultimately it enjoys the best pasture and the highest security. Not only is it not mauled by predators, it produces the best wool and the best offspring. It sometimes staggers up hills to stay with its Shepherd but it frolics in the warmth of the Shepherd’s love.   Just to be sure you have grasped the difference between this beautiful quality and the ugly imposter that beats oneself up, let me interrupt this by quoting from something else I’ve written:   James 4:6   . . . God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.   For most of my life, scriptures like this have filled me with such dread of the dangerous trap of pride that I felt driven to avoid it at all costs. Tragically, this commendable attitude got me nowhere. My godly intentions were sabotaged by such a mistaken understanding of pride that all I managed was to fall into false humility. I wrongly thought I could foster humility by thinking negatively about myself. To my horror, I eventually discovered that false humility is itself a form of pride.   I correctly understood that if I thought I could achieve anything of lasting value without God’s help, or if I thought I were moral enough to gain God’s approval outside of Christ’s forgiveness, then humbling myself involved lowering my opinion of myself. My mistake was in wrongly concluding from this truth that the basic ingredient of humility is having a low opinion of oneself.   Godly humility flows not from thinking lowly of oneself but from seeing things through God’s eyes. Pride is having the audacity to disagree with God. It is saying I know more than the God of the universe; my puny intellect knows better than the Almighty; the God of truth is wrong and I am right.   Since the God of love sees you as lovable, and true humility involves taking God’s assessment of everything as gospel, humility requires you to see yourself as lovable. If God sees you through eyes of love, how dare you see yourself in a different light, as if your perspective is right and your Creator and Savior is wrong? If God forgives you, to refuse to forgive yourself is to have the audacity to imply that you have higher moral standards than the Judge of all the earth; that you are holier than the Holy Lord. Isn’t that the very pinnacle of pride? Please avoid this deadly trap.   Make God your God by agreeing with him. He says you are the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). Dare you exalt yourself above God by disagreeing with him? Stop wounding yourself by squandering your faith on a lie, thus robbing God of faith that should be invested in him. Refuse the sinful, pride-filled path that deceptively seems humble but is actually implying that you know better than the Almighty. Set yourself free. Embrace God’s truth.   Even in Christian circles we hear so much about positive self-image that we seem to believe in the power of self rather than humility. ‘Negative’ confession seems to have done little harm to the following people.   *  ‘There comes one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose’ –  John the Baptist  (Mark 1:7).   *  ‘I am not worthy that you should come under my roof’ –  the centurion  commended for his faith (Matthew 8:8).   *  ‘I can of myself do nothing’ –  the Lord Jesus.  (John 5:30)   *  ‘ . . .  Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.’ (1 Timothy 1:15) ‘I am the least of the apostles, and am not fit to be called an apostle.’ (1 Corinthians 15:9) ‘[I] am less than the least of all saints [ie believers] . . .’ (Ephesians 3:8). –  the apostle Paul.   *  ‘I write to you concerning righteousness, not because I take anything upon myself . . . For neither I, nor any such one, can come up to the wisdom of the blessed and glorified Paul’ –  Polycarp,  revered Bishop of Smyrna, martyred c 166 AD.   *  ‘I,  Patrick,  a sinner, the rudest and least of all the faithful, and most contemptible to very many . . .’ wrote the fifth-century Christian who risked death to return to the godless country from which he had fled slavery. Before he died he is said to have baptized over one hundred thousand Irish, established more than three hundred churches and changed the course of history.   *  ‘[I am called] to be a new kind of simpleton’ –  Francis of Assisi.   *  ‘I am a mere nothing’ –  Madame Guyon.   *  ‘Oh, that I may . . . desire to be nothing and to think it my highest privilege to be an assistant to all, but the head of none’ –  George Whitefield.   *  ‘ . . . though I am of little use, I feel a pleasure in doing the little I can do,’ wrote one of Christendom’s most obvious achievers,  William Carey.  ‘When I am gone,’ he said twelve years later, ‘say nothing about Carey. Speak instead of Carey’s Savior.’   *  ‘[I’m] the most overestimated man in America’ –  D. L. Moody.   *  ‘I have often found that the place where I have seen most of my own insignificance, baseness, unbelief and depravity has been the place where I have got a blessing . . .’ –  Charles Spurgeon.   *  Having been introduced as ‘our illustrious guest,’  Hudson Taylor  replied, ‘Dear friends, I am the little servant of an illustrious master.’   *  ‘It isn’t Mary Slessor doing anything, but Something outside of her altogether uses her as her small ability allows.’ ‘I am . . . nothing more and none other than the unworthy, unprofitable - but most willing – servant of the King of kings.’ ‘I know what it is to pray for long years and never get an answer . . .’ ‘I don’t live up to half the ideal of missionary life.  . . . We are very human and not goody-goody at all.’ –  Mary Slessor,  outstanding missionary to Africa.   * Amy Carmichael’s  personality and powers of leadership were such that, according to one biographer, she could easily have become a cult figure, had she so chosen. Instead, when her name appeared on the Royal Birthday Honors List she begged to have her name withdrawn, insisting she had done nothing worthy of the honor. It is said that whenever there was a task no one else wanted to do, people would say, ‘Ask Amy.’   *  Until her dying day, even after becoming a world-wide celebrity and receiving more acclaim than any single female missionary in modern history,  Gladys Aylward  believed she could not possibly have been God’s first choice for the ministry he gave her. God’s preference, she confided to a friend, must surely have been someone better educated and of the other sex.   Such self-depreciation is so characteristic of truly great Christians that finding the above quotations was nearly as easy as finding noses in a group portrait – provided I looked beyond the last few decades. That so many people could accomplish so much while having such a mind-set is an enigma to the gurus of positive thinking. It boils down to this: succeeding in situations where others would succumb, necessitates defiant faith in either yourself or in God – and which of the two you spend your faith on determines whether your achievement will be temporal or eternal. You might build an empire by believing in yourself. In time, however, every empire falls. Only by abandoning faith in self can you build for eternity.   In terms of mass impact, I suspect positive mania has been gaining momentum and creeping over the globe only in the last few generations and the modern move seems to have gravitated particularly to America. A world-wide survey of mathematical ability in thirteen-year-olds was most revealing. Of the six countries studied, America came dead last, yet 68% of the Americans rated themselves ‘good at mathematics,’ while a mere 23% from the top-scoring country (Korea) rated themselves so highly. The American youngsters had a wonderfully positive attitude as they limped home last.   In God, native ability and confidence in self amount to nothing. A frail old lady with child-like faith in Christ can make a muscle-bound, positive-confession-crazed he-man look like a cringing weakling. She could turn an intellectual giant into a fool.   A radio’s usefulness rests entirely on which frequency it is tuned to. Anyone trying to tune into a point somewhere between faith in God and faith in one’s self, will produce little more than static, no matter what the volume of its output. When the tuning slips slightly off God, positive thinking becomes humanism. Faith in one’s self is so intoxicating and the two types of faith are so easily confused or amalgamated, that we are unlikely to see the error of our ways while our misdirected faith seems to be producing results. That’s why total failure is often a necessary preliminary to outstanding success.   Sweet Smell of Defeat   The secret of an earth-shaking ministry is to by-pass our limitations and tap directly into the power of the One who holds the stars. We’re in union with the Creator of sapphires and seraphim, molecules and galaxies. In him is all power, all wisdom, all love. Why, then, do we act like those who have no God? Empowered by him, our accomplishments should excel anything godless humanity could contemplate. Yet the more content we are to draw solely upon human resources, the more ‘God’s work’ is riddled with human frailty.   Love and good intentions are never enough. It was love for Jesus that caused Peter to blurt out words that had such the opposite effect to Peter’s wishes that Jesus retorted, ‘Get behind me Satan’ (Mark 9:31-33). Job’s counselors seemed to have been motivated by deep concern for Job and genuine love for God when they unwittingly became Job’s tormenters and sinned against the God they thought they were defending (Job 2:11-13; 4:17; 5:8-16; 8:3,20-22; 42:7-8).   We could be like little children redecorating the house for Daddy without waiting for instructions or help. Daddy might not even want the television painted. Sadly, our loving, enthusiastic efforts could prove worse than nothing. Oh, we may think we have done a marvelous job – until we meet Father face to face.   A disastrous failure could therefore be a great blessing. There is nothing like it for excising the tendency to draw upon human, rather than divine resources. If allowed to spread, that cancer would destroy an otherwise healthy ministry.   Any hurt that causes me to cling more firmly to Christ is a hurt for which I will be forever thankful. Any ‘defeat’ that has this result is a victory. What seems an obstacle to service ends up an essential stepping stone. Brought to God, a string of failures becomes a rainbow, at the end of which lies golden success (Psalm 37:23-24; Proverbs 24:16; Micah 7:8; Romans 8:28).   If the following lines mirror your feelings, you’re headed for glory.   I need the Lord, my Maker, As rivers need to flow; As flowers need the sunlight; And seedlings need to grow; As marksmen need a target, And arrows need a bow. I’ve feigned my independence, But failed to improvise. I need the One I’m made for, As eagles need the skies. You’re my breath and my light, My food and my wine. I’m the brush, you’re the artist, I’m the string and you’re the harpist. Tune me for your glory.     I need the Lord, my Maker, As falcons need to see; As the clay needs a sculptor, And a lock needs a key. As a ship needs a rudder; And coral needs the sea. I’m done with empty living; Success that’s make-believe. I need the One I’m made for, As creatures need to breathe. You’re my strength and my hope, My peace and my shield. I’m the hands, you’re the healer, I’m the sword and you’re the victor. Wield me for your glory.     I need the Lord, my Maker, As an arm needs a hand; As a babe needs its mother; And a dove needs to land; As a car needs a driver And a glove needs a hand. I’m tired of ‘great achievements,’ Of life that’s just a game. I need the One I’m made for, As deserts need the rain. You’re my life and my joy, My truth and my guide. I’m the song, you’re the Singer, I’m a well and you’re the water. Fill me for your glory.     Blessed are they who know their labors have failed, for they shall learn to serve God his way. But woe to them who vainly imagine God approves of their labors. They have their reward already.   False confidence leads to chaos (Compare Proverbs 3:5,7; 28:26).