***Disclaimer: All DID posts are written from the perspective of one or more alters and not in any way paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting/misquoting from other sources.***
ALL ALTERS
Just after Christmas 2016, my quiet alter started “talking” to me in dreams. She shared information in fragments, sometimes blanking out because the fear and shame were overwhelming to the point of creating nightmares. But she persisted. And every evening, all 88 of us gathered in front of our library fireplace with our comfort objects and listened to her share the pain she’d been holding in for 30 plus years.
Her name is Pip – it’s because she used to make the perpetrators “laugh” in annoyance with her “bold” comments & actions compared to small size and delicate appearance – and she’s the fourth host in our group (Me (I go by AlterXpressions here), Angora, Shea (male most of the time), and Pip).
Now Pip has a rather interesting skill set – she is athletic, intelligent, has amazing reflexes, perceptive, and tough – because of her time with the pedophiles, the cult, and the traffickers who worked with both groups. Pip has advanced training with hand-to-hand combat, martial arts, escape arts (from bondage, etc.), and weapons; she has mad research and logistics skills; she can tell when someone is lying; she knows when she is being followed; and she can recognize a potentially dangerous or antagonistic (dislikes her) environment by an energy change in the space.
But she has trouble talking and connecting with most people – in her mind everyone’s a potential threat – except the one’s she considers her family and other survivors like herself. She is the one who controlled our body and lived a separate life during those times I couldn’t remember what happened in the evenings and on the weekends. Pip handled the people who got rowdy outside our apartment by disarming and disabling them.
PIP
They enjoyed blocking me from job opportunities and volunteer work; keeping me afraid to go back to the police or other organizations that could help. How did they know where to look or how to keep track? My parents and sibling of course. They knew all of me; invaded my privacy, got my passwords, put tracking and recording devices on my electronics, and often searched my room/apartment/etc. They copied and stole my identity multiple times too.
When my therapists asked me who was following me? Who was keeping track of me? How did I know this? Did I have proof?
None of us could say anything. Pip wasn’t talking, and she wouldn’t let any of us talk either.
ALL ALTERS
Instead, she kept all of this from us and encouraged Angora, Shea, and me to create “legitimate” life for ourselves any way we could. While the three of us worked on that and keeping the rest of our system stable, Pip and a few alters who helped her in her work reconnected with the (now retired) under cover cop who taught and protected us as much as possible while in the cult.
He ran a private investigation firm with a few other people; it specialized in rescuing people from and helping law enforcement take down human trafficking/drug rings and cults. Turns out some of the the “other people” were boys from the male soldier sects of the cult – aka my brothers; boys I trained and worked with from 7-17. The rest were former cops and people he served with in the military. They were happy to welcome us back – all of us even though Pip did most of the hosting here – and let us join the firm with conditions.
PIP
The retired cop loved and treated me like his daughter and asked me to call him “uncle”. I loved him the same way. Same with 5 of the men in the company – they became my brothers; I became their sister.
MY REAL FAMILY
We parted ways the first time because I was going to college out of state. Plus everyone understood that neither I nor my alters wanted to be part of that world anymore. What world? The world of drugs, weapons, violence, poverty/wealth discrepancies, slavery, and trafficking.
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t join the military or the police, not then. First, I was having the anger management and grief problems. Second, I would have failed the psych profiles and other evaluations since I came out only part of the time while the others handled the rest of our life. We weren’t ready for the truth to come out. Finally, my parents and the other perpetrators would have done everything in their power to block me from joining. Then they would have followed through on their threats to kill me and harm my family.
So I went to college, determined to get out of that world forever. You can understand why the rest of Uncle’s employees were skeptical of my wanting to work with and for them after 1 school year away. Plus, many of them hadn’t met me before. You can understand their skepticism of my skill set and abilities based on physical appearance and lack of communication/socializing with anyone.
The rest of the group and I learned to trust, respect, and accept each other over time; and then they became family too. It helped that I never took any of that money for my other life. That money went to programs for helping others out of domestic violence, my bill as a “client”, and a trust to help any victims we rescued who didn’t have the resources to start over. Yes, I wanted help getting out from under the perpetrator’s thumbs. That meant getting away from my family too at some point.
When I was in charge, I lived with my real family – had my own suite to keep clean – in their HQ. We didn’t have a communication protocol, but there were ways for us to keep in touch. Plus I had a schedule of how many week days (before AlterXpressions got her full-time job) and weekends I stayed with them.
ALL ALTERS
She did this type of work for 15 years, not so much because she wanted to, but because it was a guaranteed way to protect all of us from the monsters who weren’t in jail or dead. The high-powered individuals who the police did not have enough evidence to charge or convict, but knew of and kept track of us even after the trial. Some were members of the police force. Others worked in different civil and government offices. More were medical and business professionals.
And before this work, she spent a lot of time within the cult and the trafficking rings (they eventually combined businesses to increase profit) rescuing her classmates and others who had been kidnapped. The result being many people from her past, people she didn’t back down from and honed her verbal “beat-down” skills on, dislike/hate her and sometimes take it out on the other alters. None of us blame her for that, but she blames herself and often feels shame.
This is our way of trying to show and tell Pip and her helper alters that they have NOTHING to be or feel ashamed of.
Thanks for reading
