Just a note about the writer of this book... We live in a female body, 44 years of age, single, a college graduate, with no living children. We share our life and living space with a beloved cat. We are beginning to work part-time, after being unable to work for over a decade. We were diagnosed DID in March 1997, though we had been in therapy intermittently, un-diagnosed and misdiagnosed, for years. We survived physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse and torture for the first 30 years of life, and intermittently for the next 9 years. The length of time, severity, and the extreme nature of what was done to us resulted in the creation of a very (very) large and diverse System. Perpetrators included family members, neighbors, school-mates-as well as the fathers of two school-mates, strangers, persons in authority in churches and schools we attended, and persons in the medical and mental health communities. We are also a survivor of SRA, and organized mind control programming by several different groups of individuals. We self-mutilated for decades, attempted suicide several times, and ended up in a psych hospital once. We hated ourselves, we hated our life. We held no hope of anything ever changing, of the pain and horror and evil ever stopping. We didn't know life could be any different. We finally found our way to a remarkable therapist, skilled both in treating trauma, and in accurately diagnosing DID and knowing what it takes to manage this diagnosis and re-integrate. We do not believe we would be here today without his skill, courage, compassion and unflagging belief in us, and his commitment to fight for us as long as we fought for ourselves. Although we are not 100% in following what is in this book 100% of the time, we continue to work toward ever-higher levels of this, because the ideas contained in this book are what have saved us, and what gave us a real chance at a healthy, satisfying life. There is a lot of us in these pages. Our successes have been hard-won, and they have not come quickly... but they have come. Accepting the diagnosis, learning to accept each other inside and work together instead of trying to vex each other, learning through hard experience the critical importance of good self care, doing the wrenching work of remembering what was done to us and working through it-speaking our truth, feeling the feelings, doing the homework assignments... these are things that were incredibly, unbelievably difficult and time- and energy- consuming... difficult beyond what we believed we were capable of doing. Yet, standing where we are today, we say to you that it was worth it. And if sharing any of this helps you, it was worth it. -atw January 2005
