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“How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life? We might, as a society, slowly find it possible to accept that one in four citizens are likely to have experience some form of emotional, psychical, sexual or spiritual abuse (McQueen, Itzin, Kennedy, Sinason, & Maxted, 2008), in itself a figure unimaginable and hidden twenty years ago. However, accepting the way a hurt and hurting parent or stranger re-enacts their disturbance with a vulnerable child or children remains far easier to digest than to consider the intellectually planned, scientific, methodical, procedures of organized child-abusing perpetrators-in other words, torture.”

“Whatever the theory, it is important to note that clinicians such as Kluft draw attention to the clinical error of insisting that all alters talk as one or that only the alter with the legal name should be validated. 'Such stances are commonly associated with therapeutic failure'.”

“While professionals and patients can be blamed for 'believing' in an illness or having one, patients also report problems when they are believed. Some professionals, they commented, have worryingly simplistic ideas of 'integration'. Ignoring the separately named alters in effect offers a psychic death sentence rather than aiding integration. If anything it can create a compliant false-self 'main person' who answers to [his or] her name and keeps all other 'states' in silent terror internally.”

“Those of us who work in the field of trauma and abuse, whether psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, doctors, counselors, or psychotherapists, have been provided with beautiful tools for understanding the impact of trauma. We become adept at understanding the dynamic of why the messenger is always shot and broadcast the Bionic insight of why the visionary is not bearable to the group. However, when it comes to military mind control, abuse within religious belief groups or cults, and deliberately created dissociative identity disorder, we enter the least resourced field of all.”

“Perhaps DID raises problematic philosophical and psychological concerns about the nature of the mind itself... Ideas of a unitary ego would incline professionals to see multiplicity as a behavioural disturbance. However, if the mind is seen as a seamless collaboration between multiple selves - a kind of trade union agreement for co-existence - it is less threatening to face this subject.”

“However, it is important to remember that only 15 years ago most major training schools did not accept the existence of child abuse and condemned what they saw as the unhealthy excitement that was considered to emanate from the earliest exponents. The language of their criticism is very similar... to what greets the clinician of today who speaks of DID. It has been a later knowledge that understands the way the shame and trauma of abuse become projected into the professional network leading to splitting and blame.”