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For Better, For Worse: Life as the Partner of a Dissociative Survivor

By Rob Spring

We had been married 4 years when suddenly everything changed: my high-achieving, competent, clever wife 'went mad'. It happened, literally, overnight, and so began a desperate turn of events in our lives which eventually led to her having twice-weekly double therapy sessions and a diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder. And all a result of a previously amnestic history of ritual abuse. Our marriage struggled as we both floundered in the not-knowledge of what was happening, although I can now honestly say that it is stronger, and deeper, and richer than it has ever been and than I ever thought possible.

Probably the most difficult thing in being the partner of a dissociative survivor is the isolation. I carry around a knowledge of extreme abuse, of vile atrocities committed against the person I love the most. A knowledge of paedophilia, of organised sexual assault, of sadistic perversions, of torture, of child pornography, of mind control. These things are far beyond the imagination of the majority of our friends and colleagues. I witness the effect of horrific abuse on my partner – of dissociation, flashbacks, triggering, self-harm and traumatic stress – and yet I attempt to go about my daily life (family, work, church) without it being mentioned.

This is the problem when someone greets me. “Hi, how are you?” Do I tell them that I spent several hours awake in the night as my wife recovered from horrific flashback-dreams, experiencing body-memories of pain that caused her to pass out with agony? Stories of her being 'ill' are the best explanation that satisfies people's curiosity, but years on and things aren't better yet, and so as an explanation it has worn thin. It is hard to speak to people about the difficulties in our life without feeling the need to explain it all. But what happened in the abuse was so extreme, and the effects of it are so extreme, that it is impossible to 'explain'. So instead I have a sense of hiding, of living a perpetual lie, and wearing a smile that becomes a mask for loneliness, and an overwhelming longing just to be 'normal' again. DID and the post-traumatic effects of the abuse affect our thoughts, feelings and daily life in ways that people could never imagine. How do you explain DID to people? How can you describe and explain living with 'alters'? – these are not concepts in a book, but real people with whom I have a real relationship: a 12-year-old who thinks ‘he’ is male; 'little ones' who appear when triggered or in pain, convinced that 'the nasty people' are coming to hurt them in their bottom or make them drink 'the yuk'. How do I explain that these are all different aspects of my wife?

Ritual abuse, and especially 'Satanist' Ritual Abuse, is such a taboo. Society fails to believe that one in four girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18, and the concept of the limits of evil is the assault and murders of Holly and Jessica – rare, terrible crimes that become media fairs. But who has ever seen a news report of organised ritual abuse and torture? Respectable people engaging in the gang rape and violent sexual assault of children? That such atrocities can happen next door and not appear on the front page of the Daily Mirror seems incredible. And so, when we eventually muster the courage to tell of what happened and how it caused DID, we are met with blank expressions and behaviours that indicate that we are not really believed. My sanity, my gullibility (especially in colluding with the 'false memories' implanted by therapists), even my spirituality – all are called into question as well. Have I been watching too many horror movies, is my wife psychotic, have I opened myself up to the lunatic religious fringe? And because it is so hard for people to believe in the extent of organised, intentional depravity, then it also makes it hard for people to accept the symptoms of a disorder so little understood. “Oh, multiple personalities?” they say when I try to explain. “Isn't that just schizophrenia? Doesn't that mean she's a danger to children?” Madness is still the most common judgment at the back of people's minds, and all of a sudden I feel that they think that the best place for my wife would be the psychiatric unit, and I feel desperately and shamefully disbelieved.

It is difficult to adjust to a new lifestyle of coping with all of this. Before breakdowns, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, dissociation, somatic flashbacks, and an eventual diagnosis, life seemed relatively straightforward! In the space of a few weeks our sense of normality collapsed. And it has been replaced by a knowledge that things will never be the same again, of things being so different that I have to accept the fact that I cannot just 'fix' it. I simply cannot give enough affection or empathy, or listen long enough, or be encouraging or affirming enough, to make it all 'fine' again. Life is different! And the old way of seeing the world has gone: this is traumatic for me too.

What did life become like? Simple, ordinary things become triggers. I wonder 'who' I might see when I get home. I calm down a 'little one' frozen in terror by spilling her squash on the carpet. I don’t know where she is or if she is still alive when I wake in the night to find an empty bed. I have had to grieve the loss of normality, and learn to cope with the stress. The hardest thing in the early, most difficult days, was a sense that I had lost the person I had married. Where had she gone? I had lost the competent person I had known, the person I had usually been able to predict. Instead, each day was punctuated by the presence of a whole team of terrified child parts – children who didn't know or trust me, children who had no sense of past/present differentiation, and who were sucked back by the slightest thing into the horrors they experienced all those years ago.

Living with this new 'team' of alters involved a very steep learning curve; in the first few months I struggled to accept it. “Come on – just get a grip! Surely you can stop this if you try hard enough!” were my thoughts (and sometimes my words) towards my wife; at other times I thought that maybe she had in fact just 'gone mad'. Perhaps she would end up hospitalised or dead? Watching 'little ones' become overwhelmed with the horror and fear of the 'then' feelings, reliving a particularly horrific assault, was at times unbearable. Sometimes I watched her, both of us helpless and distressed, as the physical pain escalated to the point where she passed out repeatedly. I was unable to make this five-year-old child part see that it's safe now, that it’s not happening now, that I am safe. It took a long time for many of them to trust me enough to allow me to care.

But it's very very easy to fall in love with these child parts. Through terrible reliving of trauma, I would hold and cuddle and reassure and stroke her hair; this was a wonderful thing, far more powerful than adult reason. All I wanted to do was to make them feel loved and safe. They are the child my wife was, the child she still is inside, crying out for the love and affection she never had; I found it easy to give in this way, and it began to ease my sense of helpless inaction. I didn't think it was possible to share my life (sometimes my bed) with quite so many child-centric comfort objects – teddies and a 'wabbit' for one – but doing so, overcoming my sense of 'normal', my own grown-up need to be grown-up about finding a solution, gradually helped these terrified, traumatised child parts to begin to develop some sense of secure attachment to me and for me to learn to offer attuned, appropriate comfort to them. Sometimes, to my rational, logical, male brain, it seems too basic just to provide simple, steadfast, unconditional comfort when they are triggered, but I've begun to relax into knowing that it's all I have to do because it's all I can do.

Over time, the attachment-based child parts led into relationships with some of the 'bigger ones'; in particular a teenage part who announced himself to me in the bedroom one night holding a knife, about to self-harm. This was a new challenge – surly, sensitive, mistrusting at first, without the compensation of cute loveliness, but underneath the belligerent, adolescent exterior I found the same damaged 'love-me' person of the wife I married, and I now have a very precious relationship with the honest, touchy, funny, remarkable boy-part called 'Switch'. When my competent adult-host wife part disappears, I now no longer feel a loss, but it is simply a lateral shift and I genuinely say with pleasure and anticipation, “Hello, Switch, it's nice to see you!”

Secondary traumatic stress, the way in which someone else's trauma can infect your own psyche just by being around it, witnessing it, taking it on board, is a constant concern for me. I knew that I could not cope in total isolation, and so pastoral involvement from church and my own personal counselling have been essential to get me through. The continual witnessing of alters re-living the abuse is very distressing, and there is no escape from it – it happens in your lounge, your bed, at the tea table; whereas therapists can try at least to partition off their life, seek supervision, go back to 'normal' life, this was normal life for me. At times the barrage of mental images conjured up by what I was hearing and seeing had a significant effect on my emotional state, causing high anxiety and sleeping problems. Perhaps as a defence, but certainly as a coping mechanism, we prioritised a sense of humour – gallows humour. I have never been able to bring myself to joke about the abuse itself, and it was never a laughing at my wife, but together we developed a rich vein of outrageous humour about the DID itself; over time, even adolescent parts began to tell jokes: “How many DID people does it take to change a lightbulb?” - Answer: “Lots. One to notice there's a problem. One to change the bulb. One to deny the lightbulb exists. One to say it was their fault it broke. One to forget the lightbulb is broken …” This was not mockery, but a dogged, determined effort to stay together, on the same side, through all of this, to believe that a better day was coming and that DID and a history of trauma and abuse did not mean that we had to lose everything good, and funny, and enjoyable.

Learning about DID was instrumental in both my acceptance of my wife's diagnosis, and my ability to stay – really stay, not just physically but emotionally too – and support, rather than abdicating and absconding. I had always been drawn to the brokenness in people's lives anyway – I had experienced enough brokenness myself not to remain completely discompassionate – and so I enrolled on a two-year part-time Counselling Certificate. And I read books, and I listened and I talked. I learned most by simply listening to the ‘parts’, believing them, and accepting them. I came to understand the absolute necessity of dissociation as a survival mechanism and the amazing resilience of dissociative survivors, and I developed a confidence, firstly that my wife was doing an incredible job of not just surviving but also of overcoming, and secondly that I could play a significant and healing part in the process as well. This was very important to me: the helplessness, especially as a husband, that I had felt in the early days was overwhelming, even emasculating. Having at least a tiny level of understanding of psychodynamic processes, of attachment needs, and a theory of trauma, made me feel more in control of my responses; I was able to choose what would be helpful, rather than flailing around in ignorant and ultimately anti-therapeutic ‘good intentions’. The more I understood, the more understanding I became, and the more my wife and all her 'team' were able to trust me and seek comfort and help from me.

Through it all were crises of faith: why is this happening, why did it happen, how can we 'be' in church, will things ever get better, can we cope, what does God make of it all? I still don't have neat answers to most of those questions, but I've learned that it's okay to tussle with God and to expect Him to be involved in the process, even without quick fixes and tidy solutions. I have seen God at work in our lives over the last few years, and I am glad that somehow my faith and dependence on Him is stronger, rather than weaker, because of these unanswerable issues. To some extent, just as my wife has had to, I've managed to shake off religious ideas of how things 'should' be as a Christian, the pat answers to life often preached in church, and I've learned that I can have an entirely unique, and entirely authentic relationship with God that does not have to stand up to anyone else's ideas or ways of being. My faith has become quite simple and straightforward: I believe in a God who loves us and wants to see us restored and made whole, and I cannot see the relevance of much else just now. And I think that, just now, that is okay.

Life as the partner of a dissociative survivor for me is a tremendous dichotomy: awful struggle and precious privilege. At one level I cannot imagine that things could have been any harder the last few years, and I have really had to learn what it is to stand firm and endure, whatever my feelings are screaming at me. On the other hand, I have a level of intimacy and openness, authenticity and reality with my wife (all of her) that I doubt few people have with their partners. We have had to go places together that have stripped away the frivolous and the dishonest: what we have been left with is searing, painful truth, but that level of love and intimacy in a relationship is also priceless. I hate what was done to my wife; I hate the effects of it in her life and the effects that have spilled over into the lives of us a family; but I love my wife with all my heart and am deeply grateful to know her and to be with her, DID and all.

Published in Interact September 2009

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