Collective Disempowerment and Other Roadblocks

by Mary and Allegra

Right now we feel collectively disempowered. Charity's ongoing struggle is complicated by the presence of an introject that seems to be increasing this struggle many times over.

To be perfectly clear, we know of everyone that's in our system.  We realized in 1996 that we were multiple and learned that we had found everyone by 2003.  But this doesn't mean that we've had an accurate understanding of who we are.  By definition, dissociation involves creating an alternate reality, one which differs enough from external reality to allow the collective to survive in life.  So, it stands to reason that we did not have a true, complete understanding of ourselves at the time we realized that we existed.

It's like the concept of an inner world.  Just recently someone at Mosaic Minds brought up the topic of inner worlds.  Did every system have an inner world?  We know, both as a multiple and as a one-time regular at twelve-step meetings, that we can only speak from our own experience.  And we personally know at least one multiple system that doesn't have an inner world.  So we answered the question by talking specifically about our own situation.

One of the things that we said is that while we've always had an inner world, it's taken time for us to know it fully.  We think that there's some relation between the time it takes to meet the members of the system and the time it takes to know the inner world.  We found a lot more clarity about the latter once we accomplished the former.

Back to introjects.  We recently read on a therapist's blog that introjects are members of the system and should not be confused with programmed tapes.  We're not really sure what applies in our case.  We do know that we do not have any history of organized or systematic abuse in our past.  However, we did receive many, many negative messages, both overt and implied, from various people in our life.  Family, peers, classmates, teachers, strangers both relative and complete--and it's difficult to not generalize and label our entire childhood as one constant nightmare of negative experiences.  We remember a lot more negative than positive.

The challenge is for us to not allow this negative voice, whether it's one of us or a tape, to take over our life and destroy us.  None of us are perfect, and each of us has a finite ability to resist.  We need to work together and not allow ourselves to be divided.