This is yet another survivor story. TW abuse, rape.

In 2017 our alma mater, Ithaca College, announced that the college’s new president would be Dr. Shirley Collado. We, along with the majority of the campus community, were thrilled at the announcement; Dr. Collado is a woman of color with backgrounds in psychology and sociology, and with a focus on trauma specifically. It seemed like she was going to be a wonderful and much-needed figurehead for the campus community.

In December 2017 we participated in the TEDxIthacaCollege event where we gave our talk on child abuse and DID. At that event we had a personal exchange with Dr. Collado where she looked us in the eye, shook our hand, and told us how much she was looking forward to watching our talk.

One month later, IC’s newspaper The Ithacan published this exposé revealing that Dr. Collado was convicted of abusing one of her patients, a woman with DID: https://theithacan.org/news/ithaca-college-president-shirley-collado-has-2001-sexual-abuse-conviction/

The abuse is documented and corroborated by several sources from the institute in question, and Dr. Collado pled no contendere. She denies the abuse but admits to inviting the patient to live with her; which is in and of itself a massive ethical violation and grounds for termination from the institute. It’s also worth noting that the institute in question, The Center at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington (PIW) is a clinic that specializes in treating PTSD and dissociative disorders like DID; Dr. Collado was working with vulnerable, traumatized, already abused survivors and still thought it was acceptable to breach such a massive ethical boundary.

What struck us most was how little most of the campus community seemed to care. The Board of Trustees revealed that they’d known from the start and didn’t think it was an issue, much less something they should share with the rest of the community; a petition circulated among faculty and staff to share their support of her; and we watched countless peers, some even survivors themselves, mimic all the same apologist phrases we hear constantly: it was a long time ago so we can’t know for certain, the victim is unreliable because they’re mentally ill, DID is controversial, women don’t rape / abuse other women, etc.

We were one of the only people publicly criticizing her, and we received messages from faculty and staff saying “thank you for speaking up, my whole department supports her and I’m terrified to say anything for fear of losing my job.” But because Dr. Collado is a woman of color, any and all criticisms of her were dismissed as racism. The author of that Ithacan piece is white, so despite all of the documented facts and corroborations in that article, it was waved off as a smear campaign. Our criticisms as survivors were similarly painted as racist; and to be clear, it’s absolutely true that people of color are more likely to be falsely accused of rape than white people. It is true, it is a fact, so we understand why people were hesitant to buy into the allegations right away; but we kept waiting for folks to actually read the article, actually look at the facts, look at the fact that she admitted to it herself, and that never came. Instead, we started seeing stickers handed out around campus reading “I Stand With Dr. Collado.”

We had friends, other survivors, drop out of school as a result. We talked to dozens of other survivors, faculty and staff and students alike, who were reeling and had nowhere to go to express it. The college offered two hour-long sessions through the Advocacy Center, a local non-profit that works with survivors, and that was the extent of the college’s response.

When we graduated, the ceremony was held outside on one of the athletic fields with a jumbotron up to project the stage to the crowd, so we could see each student crossing the stage to shake Dr. Collado’s hand and accept their diploma. We spent the entire ceremony desperately trying to think of a way out of it; but with the jumbotron, there was no way for us to avoid shaking her hand without turning it into a spectacle that we knew would be spun as an act of racism. We don’t remember crossing the stage or shaking her hand, just blacking out and dissociating until we were back in our seats.

Now, Dr. Collado and the rest of IC’s administration are slashing vulnerable faculty and staff positions in the midst of a global pandemic, and finally (Finally!) people are starting to see that Dr. Collado isn’t for us, isn’t for the greater campus community. We keep waiting for people to reflect, to reconsider that maybe those accusations were true after all, but so far we’re waiting in vain. This isn’t intended to be a “we told you so” – we just want to emphasize that someone who abuses their power in one arena will do it in others as well, and Dr. Collado is no exception.

And Dr. Collado, in the event that this does get back to you somehow: we remember. If no one else, the survivors you tried to silence do remember.

We’ve had this in our drafts for a couple of weeks now while we tried to gauge whether it was appropriate to continue posting about DID, or whether we should put that on hold in favor of talking about the Black Lives Matter and abolitionist movements going on across the States and all over the world. Ultimately we’ve come to the understanding that these movements and the work we’re trying to do here go hand in hand, and it’s important that we continue talking about both simultaneously.

Police brutality is a rampant issue for all marginalized groups: black and indigenous people, non-black people of color, disabled people and the mentally ill, LGBTQ+ folks (trans people especially), etc. Some facts:

– in 35 states there are no laws preventing cops from having sex with people in their custody (NOTE: there can be no genuine consent when one party is in a position of legal authority over the other)

– at least 40% of police officers engage in domestic abuse (NOTE: this statistic is based only on what’s reported, so the actual number is much higher)

– police misconduct is incredibly widespread (over 85,000 officers in the US have been investigated or disciplined for more than 200,000 incidents of misconduct) and even when cops are found guilty they often face no real consequences, or are simply let go and hired at another precinct a few towns over

– 25% of all people killed by police are in the midst of mental health crises

– as of 2016, nearly 50% of people killed by police were disabled

– a core argument in defense of police brutality is that the job itself is dangerous; in reality, cops don’t even make the list of the top 15 most dangerous jobs in the US

– black people are 3 times more likely than white people to be killed by police, despite making up only 13% of the US population

– 99% of killings by police don’t involve the officer in question being charged

– native americans are killed by police at a higher rate than any other group (NOTE: you may have seen the acronym BIPOC as part of the BLM movement, which stands for Black and Indigenous People of Color)

– over 50% of LGBTQ+ people experience mistreatment while interacting with police

– when the NYPD went on strike, crime in the city actually went down

– police do not make our communities safer. the judicial system rarely provides justice for survivors of abuse and rape. our most vulnerable are targeted disproportionately by law enforcement, and most states have laws in place to expressly protect cops when they cause harm.

– multiple FBI investigations have shown that white supremacists are drawn to police forces

Black activists have been criticizing the institution of policing for decades, and rightfully so. If most of your familiarity with the protests comes from watching mainstream news, you’re missing a great deal; we encourage you to watch videos shared by those actually on the ground. Listen to black people talk about their own experiences. Understand that your experiences are not universal; maybe you’ve been fortunate and privileged enough to have only good experiences with police; maybe you know some cops personally and feel protective of them — that doesn’t change the reality of others’ lives.

It’s our responsibility as members of our communities — and especially for those of us who are white — to stand in solidarity with our black siblings. We have nothing if we can’t or won’t protect each other.

For the folks that primarily follow us through this blog or Facebook – our most active social media presence is on Instagram. We’ve been sharing a whole bunch of resources over there and are happy to share what we’ve compiled; shoot us an email (see our Contact page) if you’re interested. If you have questions or genuinely want to learn more we’re happy to discuss.

We stand unequivocally with the Black Lives Matter and abolitionist movements, and as we said at the beginning, it would be disingenuous for us to continue with our usual posting without discussing how these movements go hand in hand with the work we’ve been pursuing here.

~ From all of us

Littles are child alters and many (but not all) systems have at least one, though it’s not uncommon for systems to have several. We have just Percy; he’s somewhere around 7-8 years old and has been since the system first formed. It’s difficult for us to retroactively trace his origin — that’s going back almost 18 years — but we do know he and Mal were the first alters to develop.

When Maddie was young (6-10 or so) she used to tell complain to our parents every so often about what she called “the sad feeling.” She didn’t have the words to describe it in any more detail than that, and it would come on out of the blue and seemingly unrelated to anything going on around her. As we got older and were diagnosed with depression, Maddie looked back on that feeling as just highly concentrated pockets of depression; she used to joke that it was “like doing a shot of depression.” By then she was able to better describe the feeling; a sudden and overwhelming sense of hopelessness that could last anywhere from a few seconds to two minutes, usually leaving her on the verge of tears.

In the last few years, following our diagnoses of PTSD and DID, and learning more about our system and the alters within it, we’ve collectively come to recognize that the feeling comes from Percy. Since first learning about him and Mal we’ve long suspected them both to be trauma holders; alters who hide traumatic memories from the others, particularly the host, in order to shield the rest of us. Knowing what we do now about trauma, I suspect those bouts of intense, overwhelming sadness to be Percy’s flashbacks. They don’t come particularly often these days, and when they do they still pass fairly quickly; he likes to sit quietly with Sawyer, Fox, or Steve while they do, and once it’s over he’s quickly back to his bubbly self.

Generally, he’s a happy kid! He’s obsessed with Pokémon — we’re talking a binder of 900+ cards (I wish I was exaggerating) that he’s been collecting for as long as we can remember, every video game, coloring books, non-coloring books, you name it. We don’t know the date he first showed up in the system, so naturally he picked his own birthday: September 16, the original release date of Pokémon Emerald. (It’s his favorite game.)

Aging varies from alter to alter and system to system, and for us it seems to be tied to the amount of time spent fronting; Maddie aged normally while she was the host and hasn’t aged since, and I age normally with the body now. Percy doesn’t front terribly often, and when he does it’s rarely for more than an hour or so at a time. It takes a lot of energy for him to be out — once he switches back in it feels like the body’s been doing heavy exercise. It’s likely he’ll always be a kid, regardless of the body’s age.

It’s very important to him that I end this with a coloring page we did together not too long ago, and that everyone knows he did the fun Raichu part and I just did the boring decorative part. Typical.

– Ros

When we first started this site the idea was that we’d update it at least every few days; then at least once a week; then maybe once a month (?); then Ok, Surely We Can Manage Something Regularly; then it just fell off the radar entirely. So, here’s why and where we’ve been in the almost-exactly-one-year since we’ve posted here:

– hit the lowest point we’d been at in awhile, dealing with the fallout of a double breakup for Sawyer and Ros + a messy falling out with some very close friends, all in the span of a couple of weeks

– started a new job

– decided to stay in Ithaca and moved across town to our first real non-collegiate apartment

– met our now-partner

– realized we were too paranoid to continue putting so much of our lives online, knowing it was visible to people we didn’t want checking up on us

– lots and lots of (and then some more!) therapy

– discovered a new alter: hey, Silas~

– made some wonderful new friends

– found ourselves back in Ros and Madds’ childhood home waiting out a global pandemic

It’s been a whirlwind, but we’re finally back in a place where sharing our stories feels possible again. We’re safe, we’re secure; we’re still working through some major setbacks (a big one being that it’s now much more difficult for us to openly front around other people) but we’re getting there! If you’re still reading this, hey – thanks for sticking around. 🙂

From all of us~

We’re very fortunate to have the relationship with Ros’ parents that we do. Bob and Chris are wonderfully supportive and make a real effort to get to know us as individuals; we’ve never known–or even known of–another system in such a position. For a great number of people with DID, the parents are responsible for or complicit in the trauma/s that led to the system’s formation. For that reason, holidays tend to be tough; particularly those that emphasize in a very in-your-face way the unquestioning love and loyalty we’re expected to have for our parents.

Ros’ parents aren’t our parents; they’re Ros’ and Maddie’s. Mal, Percy, and 9 don’t consider themselves to have parents at all. The rest of us are introjects–meaning that while the aforementioned alters originate from within the system, the rest of us have memories of lives lived elsewhere before landing here. It feels like reincarnation in a sense; while not the case for anyone in ours, in other systems introjects are sometimes able to recall how they died in previous lives to end up in this one.

For the introjects among us–myself, Bucky, Fox, Steve–we often bring with us to the system traumas from back home. Different family dynamics, different triggers, different life experiences; memories of things the body has never experienced but the brain remembers anyway. Some other day Bucky will explain his flashbacks and how they differ from ours, but that’s not a tangent for today.

Fox and I did not have the relationships with our mothers that the others did (or do) with theirs. I was disowned as a child, he was subject to half a lifetime of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse. For the pair of us Mothers’ Day is a miserable holiday. We know we speak to the experience of many when we express how difficult it is for survivors of familial abuse and those who have lost the mothers in their lives to get through days like today. We don’t begrudge anyone the loving relationships they have with their mothers, we don’t think the day should be made obsolete: it simply hurts. And here, in this lifetime, in this body, when the host of our system has a positive relationship with their mother, it’s not easy to find the space to express the sense of betrayal we feel towards our own.

To those who struggle similarly today, we see you. We feel you. We hope your pain eases soon.

-Sawyer

We’ve realized gradually over the course of the past 1.5 years or so that we have another alter forming — this makes 9 of us in total, at least that we’re aware of — so I thought we’d talk a bit about what it’s like when a new alter forms!

For most of us (me, Steve, Sawyer, Fox, Bucky) we were here as parts or fragments before becoming fully-fledged alters. I was part of Maddie until the situation with her abusive girlfriend at the time was too much for her to handle alone, and at that point I broke off into an alter. Likewise, Fox was a part of me until a trigger of his pushed him to splinter off. Mal, Maddie, and Percy are the exceptions — as far as we can tell, they skipped the fragment stage and showed up as alters right away. I can’t speak for other systems’ experiences with alter formation, but this has consistently been ours.

When an alter begins to form in our system they don’t have a name or voice yet, and we can’t see them the way we can clearly see each other. (Side note: this is also what it was like when we were first diagnosed and hadn’t yet nailed down intrasystem communication.) As time goes on and the new kid starts settling in, we generally get a name and gender, and it’s not too long after that until we can see and hear them.

At this early stage, when I’ve been fronting and then the developing alter (I’ll call her Nine for now) pops in, I can feel what she’s feeling. I can tell those feelings aren’t coming from me, but that’s as much as I can gather. Nine has come out just a handful of times over the past year, and almost always for just a minute or two.

She made an appearance yesterday while Steve and I were in class, and she was immediately on the verge of a panic attack. I was aware of the physiological symptoms — heart racing, shortness of breath, tears — but didn’t feel any anxiety myself. This is how it’s felt every time she’s shown up. Yesterday was the first time I was able to get a sense of anything about her, and even at that all I could glean was a sense of pronoun. We don’t have an age, name, face, voice–anything. It was the longest she’s ever been around, too; she was co-con with us for about 10 minutes. I can’t feel her presence right now, but I generally can’t feel Maddie’s either. I know they’re here, they’re just much, much quieter than everyone else.

We’ll include more updates about Nine as we learn more about her; stay tuned, and feel free to reach out with any questions!

Best!
Ros