(5 minutes read time)
(Trigger warning: Alchohol abuse, domestic abuse, sexual abuse and sexual violence and suicide combined DUI).
As a counsellor and hypnotherapist, I’ve worked for years with clients navigating trauma, dissociation, and inner fragmentation. I recognise it because I am aware of my own survival and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This is gradual and a way of doing what you have to do to survive. When I work with people and see that they did this for survival it makes sense of so much.
I offer a confidential service and don’t talk about my clients or their work so here I share my story. This shows you I am a humble survivor and that I get it as a professional, but not only that, as a survivor because understanding DID can offer hope, validation, and clarity for those who’ve spent a lifetime trying to make sense of themselves.
Many people say “I had a normal childhood” and I ask, “Is there any such thing as normal?” Maybe we should say, “I survived childhood” because when we are children, we are very vulnerable and we need someone to keep us alive. We are in trauma response a lot of the time, hoping that someone will love us and enable us to survive.
A Childhood of Chaos
I was born in 1967. My mother was 17, my father 19. By the time I was five, I’d already lived in multiple homes, and I would go on to attend nine different schools before the age of sixteen.
My angry father stormed out a lot (my feeling: abandoned). There was domestic violence (my feeling: unsafe), alcohol abuse (my feeling:confusion), and my experience was a deep lack of safety. My mother had another child, a brother when I was 2 (my feeling:jealous, fear from her impatience and stress), a still born boy the year after (my feeling: burden to my emotionally unavailable mother), and then, when I was 10 my father aged only 30, finally killed himself in a car accident (which was after many occurrences of DUI) (my feeling: a deep sense of sadness, loneliness and grief).
This trauma and abuse we all suffered provided the ideal conditions for prey for a narcissistic abuser. He had a young beautiful rich widow, already stressed being so young with children in the late 70s only 28 years old, and a young sad, lonely, withdrawn little girl who had just lost her dad, perfect for grooming for child sexual abuse.
Around 1979/1980, not long after my father died, my mother had a partner who was a narcissistic abuser and she seemed to be happy to have a man again. She was happy she had a man, but never safe or happy with the man. It was a very strange, confusing version of reality we all lived in. This was when I was groomed for child sexual abuse. When I was age 14, the year I got my period, he went on to sexually abuse me. That was in 1981 and 1982. They had a baby girl together the same year. He had a gambling addiction and made us all homeless after financial abuse and emotional manipulation, she was and still is in his narcissistic abuse trap. She is 75 and he is 70. He appeared to rehouse us temporarily in 1981/82, but it was also an opportunity for his father to sexually abuse me too. At 15, I was trafficked to a man he brought into the house. He would rape me in the sense of the word in the 80s. Today’s law says the whole of my CSA experiences were rape. If you take your abuser to court, they are tried under the law at the time of the crime.
Family shame
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a complex psychological response to severe, often repeated childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse. For many survivors, especially in families where silence and shame are deeply rooted, the pressure to hide the truth can be as damaging as the trauma itself. In these environments, speaking out threatens the family’s image, so the survivor is often shamed, disbelieved, or ostracised. This enforced silence fractures the self, and in some cases, dissociation becomes a survival strategy—leading to the development of alternate identities that hold painful memories or emotions too overwhelming for the primary self to process.
The burden of maintaining family loyalty at the cost of personal truth not only deepens psychological wounds, but enables cycles of abuse to continue. It protects the perpetrator. He is still attending family weddings and events. He gave my half-sister away at her wedding and they stood on the family wedding party photo. It can be seen on Facebook as a proud family day. I was not invited. However, I did attend as bridesmaid when my mother married him when I was about 16. Thanks to the wonderful system of DID.
In 1981, one uncle came to assist my mother when I divulged my truth. It was a hotchpotch of our legal system, where men protect other men. Anyway, the police indicated that he did not need to go to prison and she said she would make it all ok. She said, just tell them it is all a lie. I did what she said. She didn’t and it wasn’t. After one day of him not being there, he was back like nothing had happened.
These weren’t isolated incidents—they were repeated violations in a system of silence and manipulation. All while trying to survive school, make sense of my reality, and form any stable sense of identity.
I attempted to take my own life. I got no sympathy or understanding at all from her, who was up to her eyeballs in stress with a pub to run, a baby, 2 children now 12 and 14 and a new puppy he decided to bring into the mix for my huge responsibilities that were never mine but put on me, whether I liked it or not, all while being sexually abused. There was nothing to stop him since no one cared to take any action to help me. I decided that I needed a new version of me to feel this all-new level of sad and lonely, helpless isolation.
As a sad, isolated teenager, feeling full of shame, to escape my mother’s home where I was unsafe, I went from family member to family member with my carrier bag of clothes and toothbrush for the next day. It was easy by now to create the version of reality and the identity needed for different people and different situations at any given time.
Much later, still tormented by no one taking action and the feeling of contamination, isolation and shame, in 2016 I was a strong, level-headed counsellor. I felt very clear that I was able to do it. I attempted to go to court and he was acquitted. Aunties were going to attend but on the day they were full of excuses and no one came to speak up for me, similar to how it had been for nearly 40 years. Why did I think it would change? Well, I was expert at splitting myself (DID) and one of my realities made me believe they actually loved me enough to tell the truth. My mother’s only brother, the same uncle who came to help in 1981, attended the court hearing in 2016, and he was very drunk, but at least he came.
The justice system can not be trusted to try your case of child sexual abuse in my experience. I do not recommend it. They re-traumatise you, by making you give a full account either in person or by doing a video on an earlier day that they edit and you have to watch it, knowing the perpetrator is standing in the court watching it with the jury and you, (my feeling: vulnerable, dissociating from my body as it is feeling too unsafe to inhabit). They appoint a barrister that you have never met to question the perpetrator/defendant on behalf of the Crown and you are a witness to the crime he committed against you. It is an absolute shambles, definitely not designed to get justice for a victim of child sexual abuse.
The Birth of DID: When Fragmentation is Protection
DID isn’t about having “multiple personalities” in a dramatic sense. It’s what happens when the developing self is repeatedly overwhelmed by trauma. The child’s mind, unable to integrate the abuse, splits to survive. Different parts of the self hold different memories, emotions, or tasks. A part might carry the pain. Another will protect. Some may go to school and act “normal”, while other parts hold the sadness, the loneliness, the shame that is really the truth.
And it works—brilliantly. That’s why DID is not a failure or a flaw. It’s a survival strategy, born from the sheer need to keep going when nothing else made sense.
Dissociation and counselling
As a counsellor integrating hypnotherapy, I’ve worked extensively with parts. I understand inner systems, ego states, and protective roles. When I work with others, I learn about myself. This informs my practice. It has an in flow and an out flow of growth and skill. I can see your inner dynamics by being aware of my own real, lived dissociation. These are symptoms of DID:
- gaps in memory.
- different “versions” of you in different settings.
- different realities.
- intense emotional responses that don’t match the moment.
- internal or external dialogue that might not fit with your current values.
Observe yourself and how you speak, what you say, how you are around certain individuals and in certain situations.
Acknowledging DID has helped inform my practice, my own personal work, my reactions, my survival mechanisms. It’s made me more present with clients whose parts I now understand in an even deeper way. I don’t just hold space for their fragmentation—I honour it, because I know how life-saving it can be.
Everything I do as a practitioner is influenced by my own healing. Trauma informed my wiring, and now it informs my work—not from a place of unhealed pain, but from embodied understanding.
You’re Not Broken
If you see yourself in this story—if your childhood was chaotic, if parts of you don’t “match” each other, if your mind sometimes feels like a crowded room—you’re not broken. Your mind found a way to survive the unbearable.
DID is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of integration, understanding, and compassionate healing.
And if you work with trauma, or live with trauma, you’re not alone. Your story is valid. Your parts are welcome. And healing is possible.
Are you ready to talk?
I offer a low-cost confidential service. I offer space to speak, find your voice, be really heard and validated. I am a trained professional counsellor who specialises in anxiety and trauma. Make an appointment to meet me and tell me what you want from counselling. See if you feel comfortable. The first session is over Zoom for both of our safety and then you can do sessions over Zoom from your own home or in person in mine, in my safe, comfortable therapy room.
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Click here and book a free initial consultation with me today. Read what people are saying about working with me in counselling here. I hold a private, confidential space for you. I’m looking forward to meeting you and hearing you very soon. Best wishes, Karen.
Disclaimer: I am a UK qualified person centred counsellor specialising in anxiety and trauma within the context of counselling. I write from my experiences and from my client work in counselling. My work is dependent on the therapeutic relationship and the meeting of two minds. It is a humbling experience and that is all part of the healing process that I witness every day. It is the best job in the world. This is not an emergency service. If you need to speak to someone urgently outside of my sessions, please call the Samaritans on 116 123 (24/7 confidential helpline in the UK).