we are real whether you believe in us or not
moral panic and false accusations
There was controversy surrounding people with multiple personalities back in the 80’s and 90’s, and my parents used that to their advantage. Apparently there were a couple of unethical therapists and other mental health professionals who planted memories in children in order to create a moral panic about Satanic cults. Which of course then makes it really fucking easy to claim that DID doesn’t exist. It’s a bury your head in the sand approach. Some people doing something unethical doesn’t mean the disorder doesn’t exist.
It’s the same kind of thing where people use the small number of false rape allegations for a reason to claim to not believe a certain person was raped. The biggest reason for not believing in DID or a personal story about sexual abuse is, in my opinion, that the person doesn’t want to. There are a multitude of reasons someone may not want to believe. Perhaps because they contributed to the abuse, or because they know the abuser/s and thing that they couldn’t have done that, or because they are being abused into silence themselves, maybe even because they believe that God planned for the abuse to punish the victim. I’ve known people in all those categories and more.
Instead of believing the victims, people prefer to go with the false accusations narrative because it’s easier, it’s more comfortable, and they don’t have to do any emotional work. It’s easier to get on the bandwagon of a moral panic of people who made up stories about Satanic cults than it is to be confronted with the reality of evil.
My parents knew about this particular moral panic very well, it was spread around the cult I grew up in as a cautionary tale. Let me be clear that this cult was a Christian fundamentalist cult, not a Satanic cult. My father very firmly told me to never go to a therapist because psychology was worldly and ungodly, and that all a therapist would do was plant false memories in my head and then convince me that I was abused. He reminded me of this quite often, to the point where I wondered why it was such a big deal for him. Of course, now I know why. It’s because they had created a multiple themselves and they knew it. They knew that one day my memories would come to me.
When my memories did come to me, it wasn’t through the help of a therapist or hypnosis or EMDR or anything else. My memories came to me when I was alone in my room at night. My personalities began to communicate with me, and to tell me things. I began to re-live the memories in full sensory experiences.
My medications were working, I was considered stable, I was seeing a psychiatrist and a therapist. My mental health providers are professionals who made sure I was taken care of, and have worked long and hard to help me process my memories afterwards. I’ve always been entirely conscious in their offices and never once had anything suggested to me as far as traumatic, repressed memories.
Yet the narrative of false memories still exists, people with multiple personalities still are not listened to, because DID isn’t comfortable for people to think about. They would rather make up causes to motivate a whole segment of society politcally and rile them up about it, than to face the reality that some people have faced trauma so severe that they ended up with mulitple personalities.
Why was my father so insistent that all mental health providers were in league with Satan? It was because he had something to hide. The cult I was in used to do CPS drills, that children had to master in sixty seconds or less if a social worker from CPS knocked on the door to where they disappeared completely from view. People who haven’t abused children don’t live with the paranoia of their adult children seeing a mental health provider or a social worker.
My father had taught my sisters and I certain things to say if a teacher or a “liberal” person at church asked us about any physical marks. I was homeschooled from grade eight onwards because my father said that I was rebellious and that he didn’t trust me not to turn him in to a teacher. Parents that aren’t paranoid don’t make those kinds of comments. It was made perfectly clear to me that if I ever spoke of the things that happened to me, I’d not see the light of day again.
When my memories began to surface, I didn’t believe myself, because I knew that most people in this world would never believe me and so I must have been lying like they always said I did. My abusers purposely gaslit me enough to make sure that I wouldn’t believe myself when the memories eventually did surface. They told me that they knew as a child that I would grow up rebellious and with a victim complex. They told everyone I knew that I was a liar and slandering them and they were “good Christian people” (I’m severely allergic to “good Christian people” even though I myself am Christian), that I was their rebellious, ungrateful daughter who hated God and Christianity.
Last I knew, these wonderful Christian parents were literally praying for me to be gang-raped and left in a gutter for dead so that I would return to the cult. I know this because they told me so. I no longer speak with my biological family, but God has given me family. I have Jesus, Mother Mary, my personalities, the whole communion of saints, and a few awesome friends, all of who believe what happened to me. The conclusion that I have basically come to is that those who love me and know me, those who are truly family, believe me, and the opinions of those who don’t love and care about me just don’t matter.
