Core Self

When-the-other-woman-is-a-child

     Is April the Core Self, the original Me before we became Us?

     In their DVD series, Restoring Shattered Lives*, Tom and Diane Hawkins say "intolerable psychological conflicts, often based on false beliefs, create a seeming need for denial that leads to dissociation in the lives of severely traumatized children" before the age of seven. (Italics theirs.)
     Dissociation means barriers erected by the mind to protect the self from "an intolerable level of psychic distress" and make normal functioning possible. Dissociation is a survival mechanism, a God-provided, very effective one.
     Dissociation means one or more alter identities. It means little ones.
     All alters are created by the survivor's mind to protect the Original/Core Self. All are good. There are no bad little ones.
     I understand that each alter has a function, with the sole purpose of protecting the original Self. Some take the physical pain of the trauma or the resulting fear, rage, anxiety or grief. Some become Perpetrator Surrogates (my term) to perpetuate the threats or actual punishment, under the belief (perhaps true at one time) that if the original Self comes into line "voluntarily," s/he will be spared worse consequences from the perpetrator.
     But what I don't understand is, if they were trying to protect April, the one traumatized, why they rejected and abandoned her, bailed on her, let her sink deep into a pit which opened in the parents' bed as they scrambled away in all directions in horror and disgust? If she was an innocent victim, why didn't they show sympathy? Why didn't they act like protectors, rather than scoundrels?
     April doesn't feel psychic distress. She doesn't see her complicity in incest as life-threatening conflict. It's the others, whose who streamed from her--the first one, choking on shame, into the closet and from that little one, two more--a male persona and a virginal nun--who may have felt survival was at stake.
     That must be how they protected her. Melissa, sitting among the shoes, internalized the shame for her. Jess, trying to compensate for the sense of vulnerability and helplessness, became "one of the guys" so s/he could share interests--adventure/scientific/scholarly--with Dad. Jennifer assumed a mantle of purity where such complicity was impossible, maintaining the illusion of sexlessness.
     So April could enjoy sex play with her father, remembering only the pleasurable parts and the cuddling, without guilt and without self-loathing or blame. The rest of the selves, maybe even me (am I the Host/Primary Presenter?) are parts of her. The wall between her and each of us is to prevent her, the one who went through the trauma, from knowing it was really trauma, from being aware of the conflict at all.

*Restoration in Christ Ministries

When-the-other-woman-is-a-child