Comforting Your Alters
Those with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who live with alters sometimes have difficulty knowing what to do when an alter (or more than one, which is common) gets upset or scared. What do you do to calm them and bring them comfort?
This article will focus on soothing your alters fears and anxiety.
What are Alters in a DID System?
Now that you have been diagnosed with DID, you may understand better what you have probably known your entire life: that you have alters. What are alters, and what do they do?
Alters are parts of your psyche that were created unconsciously by the brain to cope with the trauma you were experiencing as a child. These alters have different genders, interests, and ways of viewing the world.
Some people have as few as two alters or more than one hundred, also known as polyfragmentation. People call their alters many names, such as parts, head mates, or self-states.
Alters are heard both inside and outside your head and are often experienced as being out of one’s control and unpredictable before intense treatment.
Learning to Communicate with Alters
Communication among your alters is critical to healing. When I speak of healing, I’m speaking of the goal of reaching a place in your journey where you feel at peace with your past, and your alters.
Make sure you are safe when you begin discussions with your alters. You may need to be in the presence of a mental health professional at first until you can maintain yourself in a grounded and controllable position.
Once you feel grounded and safe, ask simple questions such as “What is your name?” or “How old are you?” You may not receive an answer or even have direct contact with your alters initially, as they may be too frightened to speak.
There are things you can do to precipitate your dialogue with your alters.
Set Firm Boundaries. Children love rules and an essential part of starting communication with your alters is setting rules and boundaries to make life more bearable. Rules like limiting your alters from molesting you with flashbacks and boundaries such as not drinking alcohol are vital to your peace of mind. This goes for both your child alters and the adults in your system.
Listen. Your alters have much to say besides reliving the horror you went through as a child. Listen to them, and you will learn much from your alters. Remember, they are you, and you are them, and by listening to your alters, you can learn about the long-lost dreams and hopes you had when you were young. By listening, you learn what you wanted to become when you were their age.
Feel your emotions. Many of your emotions from the past are locked up in your alters. Some of the memories of emotions in the past are powerful, but they are yours, and allowing yourself to feel them will significantly increase your ability to communicate with all of who you are.
Remember. Always remember that if an alter is a child, they must be treated as a child. Do not talk about huge grown-up subjects; meet them where they are. Remember also that if your alters do not want to meet you, they do not have to. Eventually, after you have earned their trust, you can have a meaningful discussion with them.
Self-Parenting
You must learn how to be a parent to yourself. This milestone should have happened in your late teens to your early twenties but was missed because of the trauma.
Parenting yourself means taking on the roles of your mother and father who let you down and teaching yourself, with the help of your therapist, to parent yourself.
Becoming your own parent means loving yourself despite your flaws and imperfections. Loving yourself as a parent also means walking away from hurtful people and building a new life.
Becoming your own parent is vital if you want to change the old tapes of hurt and helplessness and replace them with those of self-respect and tossing off the blankets of abandonment and fear.
To comfort your alters, you must take on the role of mother or father to them and allow yourself to quit fearing or loathing them instead of loving and cherishing them.
Ending Our Time Together
The alters in your DID system aren’t strangers off the street; no, they are you stuck in different areas of trauma time. No matter their age, they need you to guide them to the present, where they are safe from the dangers of the past.
The best way to comfort your alters is to listen to what they tell you about the past and accept their memories as your own. This process is complex, but the only way to overcome the memories of the past and their effect on your life today is to comfort your alters, who are parts of you.
The most important thing I ever did for myself was to become my own mother. With the encouragement of my therapist, who set the example for me, I could take on the adult responsibility of comforting all the little parts of me stuck in trauma time.
I encourage you to ask your therapist about self-parenting and how it can help you soothe your alters, which will bring peace to all.
“Top 15 Things Money Can’t Buy:
Time. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity.”
― Roy T. Bennett
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
― Siddhārtha Gautama
“Nothing can disturb your peace of mind unless you allow it to.”
― Roy T. Bennett
This article is great, you hit all the basic points for befriending each other internally. We aren’t fully healed or at peace with our past yet, but this communication step (we like to call it befriending and refer to other alter systems as internal friends?) was by far the single most important step we took to date. It goes with “stabilizing + grounding” but in our experience actually needs to happen first since no one feels settled + calm around a bunch of unknown upset strangers!
I’m glad you are communicating well with your alters. That is indeed the first step and it is vital to healing