My name is Amy and I want to share with you my journals I kept while in counseling for DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, which I am still in the midst of counseling for. My DID developed from medical trauma when I was around 2 years old. I also see my counselor for healing from feeling rejected , developing an eating disorder, self-harm behavior, depression, suicidal depression, extreme self-hate, sexual abuse, date rape, and learning how to live with chronic illness and how that has changed my life as an adult.
To begin with I want to give you a bit of the background of my history before I share my journal pages with you. I’m willing to be open and honest and lay it all out in the world in hopes that someone, even if it’s just one person, might be helped to work through the tough times in their life.
Honestly I’m not super excited about sharing my weight issues part of my life with anyone, I do feel that I have to share them so that you can understand why I have felt how I have felt and also for you to know that I still struggle with weight issues more than any other issue in my life. There is not a single moment of my day when my weight is not in the forefront of my mind and those thoughts control every decision I make from which clothes to wear to places I go and of course things that I eat. My life is truly not my own, not only does it belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, Yeshua, but at times my body feels like it belongs to the genetic disorders described below and to the eating disorders that I have and may never recover from but that’s not to say that I will always be active in those eating disorder behaviors.
Another big part of my history is that I am adopted. I have a great story about meeting my birth family that I will share with you sometime. Being adopted comes with a few issues, or at least for me it does. One of those issues is the feeling of not being good enough to be kept by my birth mother. This is the farthest thing from the truth in my situation. My birth mother tried several different avenues to be able to keep me but back in what I can now call ‘the Olden Days’, the late 1960’s, it was not a viable option in many family situations. My birth family are some of the sweetest people I have ever met and my birth mother is very loving and very sweet. I’m so thankful that God has allowed me to find her and meet her.
My feeling of rejection had nothing to do with my birth parents or my adopted parents but it is something that most adopted children feel and research has shown some truth to this but my purpose here is not to address that research but rather to let all of my family know, both birth and adopted, that they are in no way responsible for my inner feelings about how I feel that I am a rejected person. I know many adopted people who feel the same way that I feel, it can be just part of being adopted. Now that this out in the open….
Another aspect of being adopted meant that I never had a blood relative to compare myself to and having a genetic disorder that left me unable to connect the dots to some of the weird things that my body did because of the genetic disorder. I was surprised when I learned that I had been born with several rare genetic disorders that come from my biological father. Everyone in my adopted family was healthy and was at a normal or average weight, I was the only overweight child in both sides of my adopted family and I have lots of cousins to compare myself to. Just a side note here, I did DNA testing and found out that I am indeed my own cousin. My 3 times great grandmother in my birth family is the sister to my 3 times great grandfather in my adopted family. That means that my Mother and I are something like 8th cousins….I really don’t know the exact number but non-the-less my adopted Mother and I are cousins and that means that I am my own cousin. If you know me then you would not find this odd, odd things like this happen to me often. I love it and I’m thankful that God showed me that I am, either way you look at it, in the family.
Finding out about these disorders that I inherited from my birth father has explained everything that has ever been wrong with my body throughout my whole life. No kidding, it even explains some of my depression and my ability to gain weight easily and not be able to lose weight as easy as it is to gain it, and all of the injuries and need for surgeries that I’ve had my entire life. One of the genetic disorders is Ehlers Danlos Syndrome Classical Type I which is a collagen disorder. EDS causes you to make faulty collagen and that can wreak havoc in your body because collagen is like the glue that holds your body together and not only does it do that, it makes up 80% of your body so every bodily system is in danger of not working well or just falling apart. This causes me to dislocate joints, tear muscles and ligaments often and I dislocate or partially dislocate a joint every single day and that it just scratching the surface of how this disorder effects my body. I have several heart issues due to the faulty collagen and at time I have a power wheelchair that I need to use. The second genetic disorder I have is called Osteogenesis Imperfecta Type I otherwise known as brittle bone disease which means that my bones tend to break easier than other peoples but fortunately the type of OI that I have effects mostly the hand and feet. To have either one of these genetic disorders is rare but to have the two together is even more rare. A third genetic disorder that I have that also causes lots of damage over time to the body is Hemochromatosis and of course, I have the more rare type of this. This one reminds me that I’m not getting young as it usually begins to affect your body in serious ways when you are older, like I am not….. This is no joke, if I have something that is wrong with me that normal people have I get excited that I’m not so rare at that moment…
I didn’t even find out that I had any of these until I was an adult, EDS in 2012, OI in 2018 and Hemochromatosis in 2022. Because of these disorders I have lived with pain 24/7 my entire life and I always thought that everyone had pain all the time, at least that is what my father would tell me when I would complain about pain. EDS causes you to feel like you have the flu every day of your life not including numerous other issues that would put people without these things either in the hospital or the grave. I always felt that if I could only lose weight that I would feel better not understanding that it was my genetic makeup that was causing my troubles and not my weight and also that same genetic makeup cause me to gain weight easily. Having this knowledge has helped me a small bit with my self-esteem about my weight, but all in all having EDS/OI and now requiring treatment for the hemochromatosis has caused me much more emotional pain than I’ve ever had in my life and daily there is a medical issue that seems impossible to deal with, I would say overcome but with all of these genetic disorders that I have there is no cure or treatment, only treating symptoms. It’s a very painful existence that I live both physically and mentally.
All of the combined things in my life, the good, the bad and the ugly have allowed me to have been on an incredible journey throughout my life teaching me lots about myself. I have come to understand that I alone am responsible for the way I conduct my life. What I mean is that I can't blame anyone or anything for the way that I am or the way that I view life. What has happened to me or not happened to me has not changed the person who God created me to be. I will admit that I do have days that remembering that truth is a very difficult task when I try to rely on myself to remind me of that fact that I am still the person that God created me to be.
The things that were said to me as a child that may have hurt, or things that were not said enough or not at all that would have helped and events that happened to me have not changed me, I had changed me by myself, for either good or bad, and this happened because of the way that I viewed the world around me. We all see things in different ways and as children we are not able to view things in a grown-up way that would help us understand what life was like around us so we tend to see things in a negative or false way. By me saying that I know that I am responsible for the things that I believe about myself is in no way excusing any behavior done to me that may have been harmful, and I’m not letting anyone off the hook as they say. What I am saying is that as a grown person it is my responsibility to find healing for myself and to not be a victim of my past because my heart is to serve God with the best me that I can give Him and to not seek healing for my hurts and wrong thoughts would be like not seeking help it I were to break my leg and expect to walk without a limp because of that unhealed broken leg.
From childhood I believed things about myself that were not true according to what God said that I was and who I was. I also misunderstood how it was that my parents loved me. My parents loved me very much. Like every person who has ever been a parent, my parents didn’t get things right all the time. They had was of motivating me that didn’t fit my personality and I didn’t understand that and I felt it as a rejection and that I was never good enough to be what they wanted me to be.
An example of this is that one day, when I was an adult, I realized that when my Dad told me that I could never do such and such that he didn’t say that because he didn’t really think I couldn’t do that. Instead he was saying that as a challenge to me. Like this, “Oh, you are no good at that, I bet you can’t even show me how to do it.” Now, some kids would say, “Oh really? Well, I’ll prove you wrong, watch this.” Turns out that my little spirit was not that "I’ll prove you wrong kind", so I would say to myself on the inside, “You’re right, I can’t do anything right so I won’t even try.” Of course, that made my Dad want to challenge me more which I received as rejection from him or him thinking I was lazy or dumb and sometimes he would say those things but I was too little to correct that or not to believe that so I grew up believing what he said. He was not a cruel man in any form, as a matter of fact I had one of the best Mom’s and Dad’s on earth. Maybe they should have tried to see that there way of motivating me wasn’t working but they didn’t for whatever reason.
This is just one small example of how my thinking was not matching what the adults around me were thinking. I was so scared of being rejected that I did everything my little heart and brain could think of to not let that happen. No one, when I was a child, ever threatened to take me back to the orphanage, I wasn’t ever in an orphanage, nor did they threaten to get rid of me, but I just felt that. I didn’t want to feel that so it was a very emotionally devastating circumstances that I went through brought on my that feeling from being adopted that causes the feelings of rejection to be so strong. Because of not wanting to be rejected I learned how to read people, so to speak, to know what would make them happy and I would always do what it would take to make them happy so that they wouldn’t reject me. This is a characteristic of DID.
With DID you develop different parts of you, different personalities, that help you deal with life. Throughout my story you will discover more about this and how those personalities helped and still do help me and who they are. DID is not a mental illness nor is it a personality disorder but it is a way that the brain can categorize itself in a way to protect the child from having a mental break down.
Many children who develop DID do so from Satanic ritual abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse and emotional abuse. My DID, as far as I know, developed from serious medical issues that I had as a baby due to the genetic disorder Ehler Danlos Syndrome. No one knew that I had this disorder at that time, but I had to have surgery on my kidneys which also meant very intrusive things happening in private areas that could mimic sexual abuse type emotions. I do not claim that anyone involved with my medical care did anything abusive to me. A result of my kidney issues it caused me to need to be dilated once a week for a year when I was 3 years old. This is a very painful experience as an adult, so much so that the patient is usually put to sleep for the procedure. As a baby, I was not only awake for the entire process, but I was alone in a dark room with only the person doing the procedure. After that procedure I was required to urinate in a cup which because of the EDS, the dilation, which is using a steel rod to stretch the urethra, would cause my skin to rip. That ripped skin would burn and hurt so badly when the urine would pass over the ripped skin I would do everything in my control to not urinate. It was something that I can still remember dreading and also knowing that my mother was be very upset with me if I didn’t urinate and I would be punished for that. Either way to me if was a punishment that I could not control.
Episodes like this in a young child’s life can cause DID to develop. In my case the reasons for developing DID is much less severe than many of the cases that cause DID in others. I have never met anyone whose DID developed from medical trauma but it is something that can happen. All people with DID suffer a great deal in learning how to navigate through life while dealing with the trauma that happened to them. Even though some causes of DID seem less sever than other cases the fact is that the DID occurred means that the trauma was too much for the mind of that child to endure which is never to be taken lightly.
Now that we have established a bit of a foundation to get us started on this journey together know that there is so much more that I will be sharing in my book about my DID along my journey and through these blog posts. Again, I want to share these things so that someone that may be struggling with DID or depression or physical issues that are effecting life in negative ways can find hope in God and the comfort and peace and healing that He provides to us.
So now, onward we go…..
My goal in sharing my journey with you is to show you the lies that I was believing and to correct those lies with what the Word of God says about me. At the end of each journal entry I will include the lie and the Scripture showing the lie. In doing this I hope to help you understand that there is more to our situations that what we see and that often, or I would venture to say always, it’s important to challenge what it is that we believe because in doing so not only will the truth set you free but you will be sure that you are sure that what you believe is true.
I am still on my journey and I don’t know what will happen tomorrow or the next day, next month or next year but all I have to do is get through today and tomorrow will take care of itself. I am excited about being on this journey, even in the hardest times of it, I know that I will make it through to the end, not my end, but God’s planned end.
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