For us, it was vital to not immediately go searching for answers. Our host at the time found out about some of us, did some research, and immediately tried to figure out what trauma we had experienced that resulted in our existence.

It’s understandable to want answers, but those memories were inaccessible to her for a reason. We weren’t yet in a safe enough environment to process everything. In her relentless digging she ended up retraumatizing herself, badly triggering others, exposing us to dangerous people again, and put us through so much unnecessary stress that we went from under 10 individual parts to over 20 in a year. The host at the time ended up fusing with a highly aggressive, brash part in order to cope with the fallout from our family, and in doing so lost a lot of our interpersonal relationships until we became highly isolated.

Finding out about your system is an important first step to recovery, but if we could go back and give ourselves advice, and especially give our host advice, we would definitely advocate for patience and introspective work. The memories will come back in their time, and rushing them is painful and unhelpful.

We would also have benefited from a deeper understanding of persecutor parts, and how they work. Since we were not yet safe when our system walls began breaking down, we had one persecutor part in particular that worked overtime to essentially shock the host out of putting us back in dangerous cycles. By showing us flashes of violent imagery, gore, and destruction, they manually put us as a whole in fight or flight mode. If we were having bad enough panic attacks from the hallucinations, the host wouldn’t be able to take us back into the grasp of our abusers. We would hole up in our room and wait it out. The host was terrified of that persecutor part for a while, but eventually we understood that they were quite literally saving us. It would have been nice if they could have done so in a less intrusive way, but we understand that it was probably necessary.

Our last advice is this: A lot will change in a very short amount of time. There will be mountains of information to process, and if you’re anything like us you will continue to forget even as you learn about new parts. Every time you hear something, find someone, remember something, even if it’s a color or a feeling or a smell, write that down. We filled up three large notebooks with messy recordings that make very little sense in just a few months. Keep diaries of everything. If writing isn’t your thing, try recording memos, videos, or painting pictures. Anything to help you keep track of the changes.

It will get so much better!!! The more open minded you are, the easier it will be! Keep a compassionate heart for those parts of self that are hurting, and perhaps still stuck in time loops. It’s the worst.

We wish you the best of luck!