For those of you who don’t know, we’re a system. We formed from trauma that lasted until now. It’s still ongoing, even if it’s less severe than the trauma that first caused us to form. I’m a protector in the system. I’m mostly an emotional protector, but I started out as a general protector. I’ve been around as long as any of us can remember. So a lot has added up over the years.
It started pretty soon after we were born actually. My mother was a drug addict. She was on heroin and a number of different types of drugs. I don’t want to say she was a bad person but she wasn’t the best either. She never really abused us as her boyfriend did, but she let it happen. I had to deal with it, being a protector. I still have a lot of the memories, like being shoved in a closet and locked in for hours just crying. I’d be left alone for entire days at a time. Luckily, I never had to deal with any of the sexual trauma. Someone else handled that.
It was bad, but after a while, we got out of that situation. We were adopted by people who at the time were our great aunt, and her boyfriend (because my mother had us when she was 15, they were both pretty young.). It was fine. They were nice enough so I went into hiding. That was a mistake.
Our dad was pretty emotionally abusive. He didn’t realize what he was doing, but it was bad. He would scream at us. One time he threw a book at our head, just barely missing us. He screamed at me once because I couldn’t do the monkey bars. I regretted staying in the innerworld most of the time, but I had no choice. It was not safe for me to be there. If they knew I existed, we’d get in even more trouble with our dad. There were no options. I just had to stay inside.
I fronted infrequently until 6th grade when things got worse. The emotional abuse was all the time. Every day. I had to deal with being yelled at because it was my job as a protector to front during abuse. Whatever was thrown at me, I took it. I could handle it. No matter how much it hurt, I took the abuse.
A year later I got careless and our host noticed me, so I just showed him that I was there. He was really disoriented and kept denying I was real, even forcing me to stay in the innerworld at times because he denied that I existed. That sucked. But at the time I was sort of a bitch. I started taking out the years of abuse on anyone around me. I would threaten people, and I was aggressive. Everyone I knew seemed to hate me which just beat me down more but I didn’t care.
Time passed and eventually, I calmed down. I became more of a big brother figure for our host and he’d come to talk to me. He still does. I was stable for a while until recently when everything began to crash around me.
I have panic attacks every day now. I’m emotionally low and I’m sort of suicidal but I don’t plan on acting on anything. I just think about it sometimes. Years and years of constant trauma has kind of broken me down and I don’t know if I can handle it anymore.