we found a persecutor and they didn't want to be found

[asdis]

Hi, we hope this is an okay topic to post this under. We have DID and for the longest time we've been under the impression that we don't really have a true persecutor. We're all mentally ill, some struggle more than others, but we didn't see any of them as true persecutors. There was too much else about them. But that's changed.

A persecutor is a type of alter that "often acts in a harmful way but there is a protective logic behind a persecutor's actions" (https://traumadissociation.com/alters). They also tend to have a distorted view of reality and are prone to system-sabotage. Almost like a protector that only knows how to hurt other alters.

Asdis, the alter who chose our name for this website, has turned out to be an actual alter. A persecutor. She has been the one driving the obsessive anxiety, compulsions, and the intense denial and guilt. She's been doing these things without us noticing her by simply injecting those things into our thoughts.

When we first noticed her, it was whatever. She seemed like the rest of us, a bit quiet, but kind, and seemed to carry herself pretty confidently in the headspace. She never really remains visible to us for long, but that's not too weird. There's over 50 of us, most of whom prefer the headspace to the outside world. Then she saw Seraphina. Those two CANNOT tolerate each other. Even a little bit. Asdis immediately started saying the worst things to Seraphina. They have fought so many times in the last couple weeks or so it feels like the rest of us are genuinely in limbo right now.

Seraphina is a protector. She holds a lot of knowledge and has a lot of power within the headspace. Although she is still affected by our trauma, she is the most capable of us when it comes to advocating for ourself. Like we've already said, Asdis is a persecutor and has been driving a lot of our ocd-like symptoms and denial. She has been isolating our most anxious alters and unleashing visualizations of their worst fears. Sending giant waves of guilt and screaming "liar" every time a flashback so much as flickers for anyone. She has been doing her best to render us silent and immoveable. The only movement she doesn't fight against is self-harm, but we've managed to avoid it so far. She doesn't want to exist, she doesn't want us to exist. Seraphina has been holding as strong as she can, the rest of us have been helping her as much as we can, but I (Starr) have also been trying to monitor the littles as best I can because Asdis is very calculated in what she does and has been destabilizing a lot of our internal helpers before going after others like the littles.

We talked to our therapist(T) today about it more and she thinks that Seraphina and Asdis are essentially polar opposites of each other, which we agree with. Our T thinks that maybe Asdis is trying to protect us from flooding again, but we're not so sure. Seraphina being at 110% for a little bit has meant that we have more access to memories than we have for a bit. The hallucinations have plateaued for now too. They only seem to spike when Asdis isn't able to control the memory spiral or derail a flashback. Our T also is as unsure as we are to why Asdis showed up now and is showing up so aggressively. Seraphina has been doing her best, but we still barely have control. There have been several times since she showed up where I (Starr) have been completely cut off from the rest of our alters and headspace and locked in the front by Asdis. Seraphina has gotten better at stopping it, but it's like playing whack-a-mole with an invisible mimic.

We know that Asdis is likely trying to protect us, but this has been so incredibly exhausting. We're genuinely surprised that we're holding it together as well as we are, she has been *-bent on making sure there is no peace, and if there is, that she disrupts it hard enough we can't find it again. The only thing we really know about her is her name, roughly what she looks like (she's been altering her form and mimicking other alters), and that she wants us all, including her, to not exist. She frequently disappears when directly spotted or found and we cannot follow her. She is also the only alter that can directly interact with the seal in our headspace. The seal blocks off a large chunk of the headspace and is mostly unreachable to us, all that we know about it is that it acts super weird when we have new flashbacks/knowledge come through.

We're sorry this is long. We just want to talk about this somewhere because it is A Lot and it's very jarring to find a persecutor five years into dealing with DID. We had been learning to manage and had been better at keeping track of everyone, but throwing a persecutor in has put us back a bit. We know we haven't lost all our progress, we still can communicate with each other, just not as well. And there's always a fear of Asdis pretending to be someone else. We are truly lucky that she hasn't taken her behavior to others outside of the headspace. But we just wanted to share. And maybe let others know they aren't alone if they're dealing with anything similar.

[NarcKiddo]

Thanks for sharing. I hope everybody can settle down a bit soon. 

[Kizzie]

Thanks for sharing Starr and I hope you (and others) feel comfortable and safe coming out here. I don't know if all of us understand DID here, but given so many of us dissociate and have parts (Internal Family Systems) it's not a real stretch to understand what you're talking about. One thing I thought of when I read your post was that it was Asdis that brought you here to Out of the Storm so perhaps they are trying to protect/help you in doing so? 

[Chart]

I'll address this to Starr as it seems they are the primary author of this post.

Thank you, Starr, for explaining this in such a clear and concise manner. I get easily confused when there're multiple people but you kept things relatively clear for me.

I had many thoughts while reading but an idea struck me relatively instinctively: Could Asdis's behavior be a "clumsy" manner of getting attention or love? Perhaps she hasn't understood how to effectively connect with everyone else and so she's acting out to perhaps get attention.
I could be completely off-base so please disregard my ideas if they really don't apply.
Sending support and like NarcKiddo, hoping things smooth out amongst everybody soon.
 

[Armee]

Hi i just want to let you know you aren't alone and I'm sorry for what you are going through.

I flop between two polarized parts anytime trauma memories start to become accessible. There are more parts too, but it becomes very difficult to manage when one part that holds the trauma begins to make it known, and other parts do what they do to manage that knowledge and to deny that knowledge.

Its a weird thing that might only work for me, but one thing that helped me during a really intense period of inner conflict was to have a running probability in my head. It was like being a neutral mediator. I'd have memories or flashbacks and freak out that oh my god these things really happened, then another part would tell me I was stupid and crazy and making things up etc and then that would trigger the other part to offer more memories and flashbacks to counter that doubt/denial part and it would just spiral. I dont know if this is analogous to what is happening in your system right now.

But I started saying "ok here's the facts." "With these facts let's say there is a 50/50 chance this thing happened." Then one part would flood me with memories and flashbacks so I'd say "ok, so maybe it is a 70/30 chance something happened." Then denial would tell me all sorts of horrible things about myself or another part would offer "proof" nothing happened so I'd revise the probability to 60/40 and on and on. It wasn't the best coping mechanism but it helped each side feel heard and validated because I was incorporating that input. Eventually I got to 99% chance to 1%. But so slowly that my system had a chance to speak and be heard and absorb the truth.

Now I'm going through the same with other traumas but haven't needed to use the probability method to deal as the intensity of that conflict is more mild.

Good luck to you and yours in finding something that works.   

Also, since you mentioned hallucinations...I had what I was calling hallucinations when I was still in denial. They were really flashbacks. I don't know if that is true for what you are experiencing but wanted to mention it in case it is helpful for y'all.

[asdis]

Thank you to everyone who responded 

We've figured out a bit more about Asdis, it's not much, but it's something. It seems that she's been disappearing behind the seal, without opening it, and that she doesn't always seem to be in control of when she disappears. It also seems like she may be being influenced by something/someone behind the seal, and that maybe that's part of why her behaviors/words are so unpredictable and contradictory. We also told our fiance more about what she's been doing internally, and he's been trying to start building some level of trust with her. It hasn't gone poorly, but it hasn't gone well either. She will let him express affection towards us (system as a whole), and will let us be affectionate towards him, but is very very against being told she herself is loved. She is sometimes okay with talking to him, although she shuts down pretty quickly and can become internally violent if she doesn't like a question or comment. We're still really unsure about what to do with all this, but we're managing.

We don't think that she led us here, solely because she is upset that we're even in therapy, let alone in support groups. We also don't think that she's looking for love or attention as she has told our fiance that she doesn't want love or to be loved, and also has been trying to stop us from reaching out to anyone for any reason, even if they reach out first. There is a slight possibility that that holds some weight though, because her reasoning for not wanting those things (from what we can gather) is that we don't need/deserve love or attention. It's a bit murky as she is only consistent in the sense that she won't allow internal peace to last longer than maybe 5-10 minutes at a time.

We don't know about the probability thing, but thank you for sharing. We might try it when the ocd-like symptoms die down a bit. And for the hallucinations, it's pretty confusing to figure them out. We do have a decent amount that we know are flashbacks or rooted in flashbacks, but we know that's not all of them. We know the random/shadow figures we see and the living noises we hear are tied to our trauma, they happen most intensely when a strong denial episode hits. We think that some of the "monsters" might be tied to trauma as well, though we deal with those most intensely during periods of uncovering new memories or during flooding. However we have a weird thing where we are able to see/hear either nightmares or flashbacks as if they are the real world without losing connection/ability to see/hear the real world. It's honestly kind of rare that we don't experience that, it's not 24/7 but usually persists for about 1-5 hours a day. With the way Asdis has been we've been dealing with them a bit more as well.

[asdis]

We know a bit more about Asdis now, but it's still not much. Some doctors visits these past couple months brought us back some "new" memories. We put new in quotations because we've technically had them this whole time, we can just see them more clearly now. These memories coming through more clearly affected the whole system, but the way it affected Asdis in particular is what gave us some new insight.

We were conducting a system meeting in the new way, which for us means Seraphina and two others hold the meeting, the rest of us join the meeting one at a time to make sure we can't be fully grouped up for a persecutor attack. During meetings with others, Neverknown noticed that Asdis was starting to "glitch out" whenever the memories were talked about or referenced. Due to the setup of our meetings it's rare that anyone only gets met with once. Then Seraphina and the others met with Asdis. Her "glitching" was her messily shifting between 8-ish and "vaguely young adult". Another new thing was that, despite her glitching, she was the most lucid in relation to reality (past and present) that she had been the whole time since she showed up. There was still some denial, but nothing close to what it had been before. We found out that she's afraid of those memories, afraid of our body (especially as we learn more), she's upset by our body and what led it to this state, she's upset that our body couldn't "keep hiding it", she's afraid that our physical state is going to greatly affect our outside/physical safety. Whether she's 8-ish or vaguely young adult, she has those fears and feelings. However, when she's 8-ish she is more lucid. She knows what she does to the system but she's afraid of it, she can't stop it even though she doesn't want to do those things, and she tells us she doesn't know why or where it comes from, but she wants to stop and she hates disappearing when she doesn't try to. When she's vaguely young adult, she knows what she says and does and stands by it. She has the memories and fears but can't quite connect to them properly. They fuel the way she treats the rest of us despite acknowledging that the current trigger is her own memories. There is very little information to get from her in that state and very little we can say to her.

We were also able to figure out that the seal doesn't just affect Asdis, but several of the rest of us as well. It affects us all a little different, but there are some clear connections between the seal and personality/memory changes for some of us on the inside. That meeting was a couple weeks ago now. We've still been majorly dissociated day to day, it's been that way since August. We've found several nonverbal alters that aren't Sorrow or the nonverbal littles we knew about already.

We found out a bit more about our past from Asdis yesterday that we don't have any context for (or rather, don't want to acknowledge the context for). A nonverbal alter and Asdis were writing something together. She's pretty much only been around when she's 8-ish for the last couple of days. Asdis wanted to share it with our partner. She's gotten a bit more comfortable with him and is occasionally willing to talk about heavy things with him, as long as she stays 8-ish. There was an internal struggle over it, the nonverbal alter was turning our voice off whenever Asdis was present once he got home. It took a couple hours before Asdis was able to even tell him that she wrote something. It hasn't been shared, though, because of what she said about why she wanted to share. We knew that they were writing about something heavy. She warned him, we warned him that sharing it may stir things up for us inside. Asdis and our partner were discussing when to share it and he suggested waiting until he's off work for a few days in a row. She agreed, tried to show him immediately, and then told us (him and us) that she wants to share soon because "they'll have to answer you, they're programmed to" and that she "doesn't want to disappear" before it's shared. She knows it will likely hurt, she knows it might backfire, and internally she's shared that she's certain she'll go back older and make it worse if we wait too long.

It's hard to put much of the recent revelation into words, because it makes it more real, and because we're afraid to be wrong. And it's hard to trust that we've come to the right conclusion or gone in the right direction. It feels like we have because saying we're wrong relieves some of the related fear, and we know that that usually means we've found something that the denial can't handle. We haven't told our therapist yet, we just this past week got her off our back about inpatient/meds. We're going to tell her. We just don't know when. It's nice to know more about Asdis, it's helpful to know more about our system as a whole. She hasn't been as much of a persecutor the last couple days. She has moments but she hasn't been getting stuck in them as much and the typical things that she would do to us have been happening to her as well. We don't really know who's driving those things anymore though. It's weird, knowing there's still a persecutor (or possibly multiple) that are still hanging around without the rest of us having access to them. We can't tell if Asdis's ages split because she's so sure she'll "disappear" and become older again. We know this is rambly and a little confusing. We don't know that we're really looking for anything except maybe just being heard/seen. 8-ish Asdis is the drive behind posting this, for an alter that wants nothing more than nonexistence she has become very intent on being heard/seen, as long as she doesn't feel like she'll get in trouble for it.

[NarcKiddo]

I'm here and I have read your post. It sounds like maybe Asdis is feeling a bit safer to show up within the system.