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When Justice Fails The Children:
Quick Synopsis, clarifications and answers to FAQ
What readers have learned thus far:
1) In 1992, while working as an educational psychologist, a 13 yr. old student named Kristy (not her name at the time) came to my attention. She was extremely oversexualized, acted out in extreme and inappropriate ways and was identified as "emotionally disturbed." We connected quickly and easily and her behavior rapidly improved.
2) As she grew stronger, her parents behavior became increasingly bizarre and hostile toward me, so much so I began to fear for my safety (and I am not easily rattled). Finally, they pulled her out of school and said they were going to home school her and she effectively disappeared from the community.
3) Two years later, she resurfaces with an accusation that I sexually molested her in my office during the time we worked together and this was followed by an intense three month investigation which ended with the case being closed due to provable documentation that her claims were false.
4) Again for two years there is no sighting of her in the small community in which we lived; however in 1996 I, the police and the school district received a handwritten letter from her painfully asking for my forgiveness and stating that she was forced into making that accusation by her parents. At the time of this writing she stated they no longer lived in XXX, she was pregnant with her father's child and had been removed from the home.
5)Twelve years later, in the summer of 2008, Kristy finds me via my then-just-set-up website and tells me that she has been looking for me all these years. She tells me that she suffers tremendous challenges due to the years of extreme abuse and that she is identified with a Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Ten "others" in addition to herself live inside her, ranging in age from infant to forty two. Kristy herself is twenty nine, about to turn thirty.
6) The girl that I had worked with is known as K (name changed for legal liability purposes)and Kristy explains that due to intense abuse that only got worse after she was pulled out of school (she never did receive any schooling after that) K "disappeared" at the age of sixteen and that is when Kristy took over as the main "host" or personality.
7) Kristy had written a brief autobiography of her life up until the age of sixteen (actually K and Kristy wrote this together) and it is included in full in PART IV and painfully describes the details of her childhood.
8) When Kristy first contacted me last summer, she told me in a very early email that she had been working hard with a therapist and hoped to "integrate" (i.e. merge) the personalities as she wanted to prosecute her parents (whom she chose only to refer to as, "the Assholes," and not by name. At the time of this writing she had recently moved to another state and had not yet found a therapist who was experienced in DID (multiple personality disorder), but she was looking for one.
9) I explained to Kristy that because she was contemplating prosecution of the parents at some point, it was imperative that all, that every bit, of our communication be in writing. This was for her protection as well as mine so that in no way could her testimony be discredited by the parents stating that I had coerced her into making these accusations in retaliation for what occurred fifteen years earlier. For this reason, all of our conversations took place either through emails and/or through Instant Messages.
10) I have, now locked away in an attorney's office, several hundred pages of her written testimony and feelings about the pastor and his wife who adopted her at age four and proceeded to ritualistically, systematically and continuously rape, beat, isolate and intimidate her.
11) Part VI of the story ended with the emergence of the personality I am referring to as S, who has commanded me to stop corrupting K and Kristy, stating that they need to learn to obey and honor thy father and thy mother.
Answers to the most frequently asked questions to date:
Q:
I don't get the multiple personality thing. I mean, did she live alone? Was she able to ever work or take care of herself? I am confused, is K the same person as Kristy or are they two different personalities/people?
A:
Dissociative Identity Disorder is a complicated and elaborate defense system that is occasionally developed in very intelligent individuals who have been subjected to ongoing and extreme abuse. While it differs from person to person, it seems that a common thread is that there is an "inner system" that has been established. In some people they are not aware of the others (sometimes called Alters). In Kristy's case, there is a levels system which is about to be explained in the next part of the story.
Prior to moving to the state in which she was currently living, Kristy had worked two jobs--one at Walmart and one at a brain and spine rehabilitation facility. Over the years she had lived both alone and with a partner--a woman she was still very close friends with, but no longer involved with in a romantic way.
Kristy's stability and ability to manage this disorder varied greatly, and was highly dependent upon her having ongoing therapy with a skilled clinician. Because she had no such therapist in her current living location, she was in and out of the hospital due to severe self injury issues. There were some of the personalities which were very punitive and Kristy's body bore not only the scars of her parents abuse, but the scars of her own. The picture you see on the video is of a self-inflicted burn on her arm.
The next chapter will identify her various personalities and the system within which they functioned. One thing I will say here, that no doubt I will repeat with frequency, is that while Kristy most definitely suffered from a mental illness, in no way was she crazy.
As you will come to see, there is a stunning difference between someone being crazy and incapable of functional living, thought and patterns of thinking and acting and someone having to manage an emotional disorder that challenges the way they live, but does not necessarily mean living a relatively normal life is an impossibility.
Q:
How come all those teachers just disappeared? Why didn't anyone help her?
A:
Well, I can't answer this question definitively, but I can make some educated guesses. These were very, very intimidating people who seemed used to getting their way. The reason, Kristy wrote me, they hated me so much was because I was the first person they could not intimidate-- that would not capitulate to their demands, and who stood strong as an advocate for her. I can certainly see how each time a teacher started getting close to Kristy, how these parents might raise threatening issues and demand that she be removed from that class and placed in another one--one with a less compassionate or less personally involved teacher. In Kristy's words, they referred to me as a "nosy c..t that they were not about to let land them in jail."
Another important thing to keep in mind is that all of us over the years--all the teachers, the psychologists, the principals--all of us had been introduced to the children of this family as children that the pastor and his wife had rescued out of a ritualistically sexually abusing cult situation and told that this is why not just Kristy, but all the children, were so disturbed. We had no reason whatsoever to question this. These cults exist; as educators and psychologists, we knew this (much as we preferred to wish otherwise). That Kristy would be terribly damaged from having been raised her first four years in such a setting seemed a reasonable explanation.
Even though I so strongly suspected that she was being abused in the pastor's home, it never once occurred to me that they in fact, might be the ritual abusers and that the kids had not come out of that situation, but rather had been adopted into it. It wasn't until I started hearing the rest of the story (beginning last summer) that this hit me.
I do have many questions myself as to why she was not removed from the home prior to the age of 17 (as did she), however, only a competent and very thorough investigative reporter will be able to unravel that part of the story. I have all the names, dates and places of the various teachers, social workers, psychologists, mental health workers, etc that filtered through Kristy's life. It will take an investigative reporter who has a passion for the truth and for justice to do the digging and the interviewing and the questioning that needs to be done to really understand how it is that this child remained in the home and the parents remained untouched by the law.
Showing posts with label dissociative identity disorder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dissociative identity disorder. Show all posts
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
When Justice Fails the Children: PART IV, Kristy's story by Debra Sanders
When Justice Fails the Children: Kristy’s story
Part IV
At the time that I received Kristy’s first email, I had not been a practicing educational psychologist for several years. Officially, “retired” due to the head injury and its ongoing ramifications, the final version of Panache was just heading into print, with a scheduled release date of November 18, 2008. My world had become a quiet one, with pecked out words as my companions and the daunting task of having to learn the business end of writing a book, despite the fact that remembering any new information seemed a monumental,and quite possibly impossible, task.
About a week before I heard from Kristy, my website went up and although there are many Debra Sanders out there, this time when Kristy performed what I was to learn was her ongoing search for me, the http://debrasanders.com website was the first to pop up on Google. Clicking on the link, the first thing Kristy saw was my picture and she realized, “Oh my God, I found her. I really, really found her.”
And so, through the contact me box on my website, Kristy sent that initial communication and at 3:17 in the afternoon on August 24,2008 I responded with this:
"Kristy, all I can say is that for the first time in several years, I spoke about you two nights ago...That you would out write me out of the blue less than 48 hours later, is simply astounding to me. Please write and tell me how you are, where you are.
Debra
Kristy’s response, composed as rapidly as I had written mine, told me she was living in XXX, having moved there from XXX a few months prior. "The hardest part of living there", she said, was that she was "in a very rural area and there were no therapists who specialized in dissociative disorders". She went on to say, “I still have a LOT of problems cause of the abuse. I am diagnosed with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and I have 11 different parts.” Kristy went on to explain that in the last state in which she had lived, she had an excellent therapist and had been functioning well enough to hold down two part time jobs—one at Wal-Mart, the other as an aide in a head and spinal rehabilitation center.
I found it almost as surprising that she had been working in the area of head injuries as I found the simple reality of having been contacted by her.
As is common when two people reconnect with an interim of fifteen years between contacts, there was an initial flurry of emails, with Kristy filling me in on some basic aspects of her life. She did not know what state her parents were in, refused to refer to them by name, but rather simply called them the “A**holes;” and she had gotten her GED at nineteen. “How I did it I I have no clue since I left *** middle I never did any school after that. During that time the abuse got worse since there was no school to escape to and that's when K.left being the core part.”
Kristy went on to explain that no therapist had ever been able to help her integrate (merge her independent parts) because K. had not resurfaced since disappearing fifteen years earlier. One of the reasons they had been looking for me for so long, Kristy explained, is that she thought maybe K would emerge in order to talk to me and if they could stabilize their mental health, she was thinking about prosecuting her parents for the abuse she had endured.
“I told K.I found you since she mentoned you a lot when we were younger and I knew you too since I watched her but she seemed scarred maybe you and her can work stuff out. But its up to you.
I want to get her your book do you think that's a good idea?”
Almost immediately, I received an email from K:
“Ms Sanders its K. are you mad at me for being a bad girl? i sorry i was bad when you knew me. i only did what daddy an mommy told me to do. They were so bad to me i sorry i didn't tell you what they all did to me i wanted to but i was afraid to i knew it would never stop. i miss your letters you wrote me in school even though mommy always found them i tryed to hide them but when you have to strip as soon as you get home she'd find them. i hope you dont mind i told kristy about you. i dont want to be out in this world anymore i like being safe inside. you will like kristy shes not like me shes brave. after i left school daddy moved into my room and he became my husban he told me noone would ever protect me so i better not tell another person. mommy became meaner to and she started hurting me too. i cryed for you when they were not around which was very seldom and then id go inside and cry to kristy i couldnt keep doing it so kristy took over. i wanted you to save me but i knew you never would why would you when i was so bad. kristy told me she found you and it scared me cause how could you still like me after what i did. i protected mommy and daddy instead of you and you never hurt me they did. did you ever know how bad it was for me i remember you tryed to get me to tell you before mommy got in the way then you tryed to get me to write it to you. i couldnt i hope you know why. although i wanted to so bad i dreamed of telling you and you saving me but id wake up with daddy having sex with me so i knew i could never tell. im going to go back inside please dont tell mommy and daddy i wrote to you”
I received this email at noon, August 25, 2008—not quite twenty-four hours after the first contact.
OMG, I thought. Holy, holy shit. Is this for real? Clearly, I need to establish parameters.
Whoa….wow.
Now my head was really spinning.
TBC. Read on to find out what else K and Kristy wrote and how I established a non-therapeutic relationship with her, while wrestling in my head with the ethics of continuing written correspondence.
Part IV
At the time that I received Kristy’s first email, I had not been a practicing educational psychologist for several years. Officially, “retired” due to the head injury and its ongoing ramifications, the final version of Panache was just heading into print, with a scheduled release date of November 18, 2008. My world had become a quiet one, with pecked out words as my companions and the daunting task of having to learn the business end of writing a book, despite the fact that remembering any new information seemed a monumental,and quite possibly impossible, task.
About a week before I heard from Kristy, my website went up and although there are many Debra Sanders out there, this time when Kristy performed what I was to learn was her ongoing search for me, the http://debrasanders.com website was the first to pop up on Google. Clicking on the link, the first thing Kristy saw was my picture and she realized, “Oh my God, I found her. I really, really found her.”
And so, through the contact me box on my website, Kristy sent that initial communication and at 3:17 in the afternoon on August 24,2008 I responded with this:
"Kristy, all I can say is that for the first time in several years, I spoke about you two nights ago...That you would out write me out of the blue less than 48 hours later, is simply astounding to me. Please write and tell me how you are, where you are.
Debra
Kristy’s response, composed as rapidly as I had written mine, told me she was living in XXX, having moved there from XXX a few months prior. "The hardest part of living there", she said, was that she was "in a very rural area and there were no therapists who specialized in dissociative disorders". She went on to say, “I still have a LOT of problems cause of the abuse. I am diagnosed with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and I have 11 different parts.” Kristy went on to explain that in the last state in which she had lived, she had an excellent therapist and had been functioning well enough to hold down two part time jobs—one at Wal-Mart, the other as an aide in a head and spinal rehabilitation center.
I found it almost as surprising that she had been working in the area of head injuries as I found the simple reality of having been contacted by her.
As is common when two people reconnect with an interim of fifteen years between contacts, there was an initial flurry of emails, with Kristy filling me in on some basic aspects of her life. She did not know what state her parents were in, refused to refer to them by name, but rather simply called them the “A**holes;” and she had gotten her GED at nineteen. “How I did it I I have no clue since I left *** middle I never did any school after that. During that time the abuse got worse since there was no school to escape to and that's when K.left being the core part.”
Kristy went on to explain that no therapist had ever been able to help her integrate (merge her independent parts) because K. had not resurfaced since disappearing fifteen years earlier. One of the reasons they had been looking for me for so long, Kristy explained, is that she thought maybe K would emerge in order to talk to me and if they could stabilize their mental health, she was thinking about prosecuting her parents for the abuse she had endured.
“I told K.I found you since she mentoned you a lot when we were younger and I knew you too since I watched her but she seemed scarred maybe you and her can work stuff out. But its up to you.
I want to get her your book do you think that's a good idea?”
Almost immediately, I received an email from K:
“Ms Sanders its K. are you mad at me for being a bad girl? i sorry i was bad when you knew me. i only did what daddy an mommy told me to do. They were so bad to me i sorry i didn't tell you what they all did to me i wanted to but i was afraid to i knew it would never stop. i miss your letters you wrote me in school even though mommy always found them i tryed to hide them but when you have to strip as soon as you get home she'd find them. i hope you dont mind i told kristy about you. i dont want to be out in this world anymore i like being safe inside. you will like kristy shes not like me shes brave. after i left school daddy moved into my room and he became my husban he told me noone would ever protect me so i better not tell another person. mommy became meaner to and she started hurting me too. i cryed for you when they were not around which was very seldom and then id go inside and cry to kristy i couldnt keep doing it so kristy took over. i wanted you to save me but i knew you never would why would you when i was so bad. kristy told me she found you and it scared me cause how could you still like me after what i did. i protected mommy and daddy instead of you and you never hurt me they did. did you ever know how bad it was for me i remember you tryed to get me to tell you before mommy got in the way then you tryed to get me to write it to you. i couldnt i hope you know why. although i wanted to so bad i dreamed of telling you and you saving me but id wake up with daddy having sex with me so i knew i could never tell. im going to go back inside please dont tell mommy and daddy i wrote to you”
I received this email at noon, August 25, 2008—not quite twenty-four hours after the first contact.
OMG, I thought. Holy, holy shit. Is this for real? Clearly, I need to establish parameters.
Whoa….wow.
Now my head was really spinning.
TBC. Read on to find out what else K and Kristy wrote and how I established a non-therapeutic relationship with her, while wrestling in my head with the ethics of continuing written correspondence.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
When Justice Fails the Children: PART VI Kristy's story by Debra Sanders
Part VI: When Justice Fails the Children-Kristy’s Story
The emails continued to fly back and forth with a kind of frenetic intensity and within a week’s time nearly a hundred emails had been exchanged. K had so many questions for me: Did I still live in Alaska? Did I smoke? Did I have others that lived inside of me the way they do? Did I remember Ms. M, one of her favorite teachers? Did I know how old she was? The questions came in a flurry, as I suppose they would from a person who woke up to discover that fifteen years had passed in spite of the fact that to them, it had only been a few days.
K wanted to know if I still worked in schools; was I married, was it bad for her to be mad at her parents and was I scared of them like she was scared of them. She wanted to know if I was aware that her parents wanted to hurt me and did I have my own mommy and daddy and were they nice. And then on August 28, she writes that Kristy had showed her my website and that she does not “like big dogs daddy made one have sex with me now I scared of them.” She ended this particular email telling me she felt kind of weird and wondered, “am I asking to many questions well I better stop I love you in a good way K.”
The lack of punctuation and immature spelling came to be a trademark “K” characteristic and although Kristy did not use much punctuation (specifically, she never inserted question marks), she did write on a much higher level than K was writing and in a very different "voice."
If my head wasn’t spinning from the residual effects of the accident, it would have been spinning from the volume, intensity and content of these emails. I was grateful that I had gotten the sanction and support of her social worker, and wanted to make sure that nothing I said or mentioned would be in conflict with whatever therapy she was receiving. I was shocked and sickened by the information provided and in my worst nightmares had not imagined abuse of this magnitude. I did not want to express my outrage in a way that would trigger her or cause a defensive reaction, but I could not just ignore the information given to me.
Is it possible that such atrocities truly exist in this world…that people could be so cruel…so sick, so intentionally destructive of a child’s life? It was almost more than I could wrap my mind around and yet the context in which things were said sounded real,--not imagined and not made up. There was the ring of truth to the content of those emails, whether they were written by the nearly thirty year old Kristy or by K—who although was supposedly fourteen, really came across more like a six or seven year old in terms of her thinking and “speaking” abilities.
Quickly I found myself getting the stress-related headaches so common since the accident—the ones which came when my brain was simply overloaded with too much information, too much stimulation. The ones that produce a brain freeze that could shut me down without warning and send me into narcoleptic sleeping bouts that might last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
Kristy, I discovered, was extremely sensitive to and concerned about me overtaxing my brain. I was enormously impressed by and fascinated by her own nurturing approach, not just to K and the “Littles” (as I was to learn she referred to the younger others), but to me as well. In an early email I had mentioned,
“I am struggling with a nasty headache today...partially from spending so much time on the computer the last few days, partially because that(as you probably know from working at the clinic) is just a function of a head injury. I always have to be careful with how much I "think", and right now, I am spending many, many hours every day writing and getting ready for the book release. I only tell you all this because if you don't hear from me, it’s possible I fell asleep! That happens alot if I overstress my brain....I just...conk out. Know that I willl be back as soon as I am able.”
Kristy’s emails often initiated with a bold faced warning to "...NOT READ UNTIL YOU FEEL UP TO IT", and she often expressed concern that the communication was too much to be good for me. Even so, although Kristy and K did talk “inside,” they were not always aware of each other’s whereabouts and doings and although Kristy was very respectful of both my time and energy, she was not always aware of just how much information K and I were exchanging (this was soon corrected by a folder system that Kristy—with K’s permission—initiated so that she could catch up on the email exchanges before contacting me). This helped lessen the number of emails substantially.
All the information and questions were coming in incredibly fast and it was impossible for me not to respond with equal rapidity. I had wondered for so many, many years what had become of this girl and I was both so horrified and drawn in by the information she was giving me, but I knew I needed to moderate my number of replies—for both our sake. Although K and Kristy seemed like two very distinct individuals, they still were coming from one body and this had to be exhausting for Kristy as well.
In my responses I was concentrating hard at not seeming therapeutic and I worried that I might not be able to hold the line as just a concerned and supportive individual in Kristy's life. I soon realized however that the utter compassion I felt and the kindness that I extended through caring words could not help but be somewhat therapeutic in their response. To make sure that no boundaries were crossed or inadvertent damage done, I got Kristy's permission to share the emails with her social worker so that a clear loop of communication was in place.
Following is an email sent in response to several of K's questions to me:
Hi!
Well my goodness, K, have you saved all these questions up for all this time???!!!!! Well, don't feel bad about asking so many of them--I did the same of Kristy when she first wrote!
Let's see…why was I in an accident? Well, not for any good reason that I can figure out! Actually, it happened on the way to work very, very early one morning...about 6:00 a.m. I was living in a real rural part of Utah then and was going to a meeting at a school quite far away...and I am not good with early morning driving because I am always sleepy in the morning. I am always most wide awake at night and usually I don't schedule meetings early and far away for this reason, but this was an unusual circumstance, so I agreed to it. It was on a Monday and I had to go to my office first to get stuff set up for the week, so I had to get up around four in the morning and be at my office by five so I could be on the road by 5:30.Unfortunately, I feel asleep driving there and rolled my truck. I didn't even hit my head, but because I was on cruise control at 55mph, the velocity of my brain slamming into my skull was quite intense. Not very smart of Ms. Sanders, was it??!!!
Yes, my dogs are big (well one is really big, one is actually kind of small by comparison) but both of them are very, very gentle. And neither one would have participated in anything like sex with a human person. Ever. Dogs have to be trained to do that, K and I am so sorry you experienced that.
Lets see...do I still work in schools? Not now, no. I did for a long, long time, but the head injury creates some problems that make it really hard...so although I do some training of teachers and counselors and I speak to groups who ask me to come talk to them, I am not working in a school like I used to do.
Am I married? Nope. I am on a solo ship on my own little sea and I have a really nice life, with wonderful friends and my two boys (that's what I call my dogs a lot of the time).I was married when you knew me, but we were divorced many years ago.
Hmmm...next...is...oh, is it bad to be mad at your parents? My own opinion on that is no, it is not bad at all...it is normal and healthy to be angry when someone doesn't treat you kindly or doesn't take care of you the way they are supposed to. Parents are supposed to protect their children, not hurt them or scare them or make them do things that are not healthy to their development. And K, I don’t think there is anything bad about you at all. I think the hardest part is over And you know what? I think the hardest part is behind you and such pain will never find its way into your life again.
As to my own parents, both have died, K, so I guess technically I don't have a mommy or daddy anymore. At least, not on this earth. But their spirits still are within me, so I kind of always feel like they are near me when I want or need them to be. Were they nice? In most ways they were, K. Like all people they each had their "issues" and sometimes those issues got in the way of their being good parents, but they were not abusive and they did not lock me up or frighten me or make me do things that would end up damaging my ability to trust people. I am grateful for that and wish it could have been so for you.
Yes, Kristy did tell me she is a lesbian and I think that’s great as long as she is in a relationship that is gentle and kind and that gives her support and love and that she can return the same to her partner. Most important to me about any relationship is that people treat each other with kindness and respect.
You know what makes me feel so happy inside, K? Hearing you say you love me in a good way...because that tells me that you know there are good kinds of loving in this world and that there is loving that doesn't hurt and that isn't confusing or full of drama.That there can be simply...loving someone. And believe me, there is nothing better, nothing healthier, nothing to treasure more than loving somebody (or a pet) in a good way and being loved back in the same sort of good way.
Know that you are cared for and loved back in that good way and not just by me, but by others as well.
Well, it’s almost 9:30 my time and I have tons to do before I go to sleep...so I better start doing it or I will be up wayyy too late. One thing about my life now is that I go to sleep a whole lot earlier than I used to. And I take naps too! As long as my brain gets a LOT of quiet time and rest, it does okay in most ways. So I shall say good night for now, K. Thanks for writing and talking with me. It’s so nice to "hear" your voice.
TTYL,
Love, Ms. Sanders
To my surprise, the following email showed up in my box at 6:30 in the morning:
I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE OR WHY YOU ARE TRYING TO CORRUPT K AGAINST OUR FATHER. HE WAS THE CHOSEN ONE TO GET TO SPEAK AND HEAR GOD. GOD TOLD HIM TO BREED AND PRODUCE FRUITS OF HIMSELF. K BROUGHT THE DEVIL INTO THE BABY SO GOD MADE HIM SACRIFICE IT. KNEEDS TO LEARN HOW TO HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.
S.
Whoa. Holy Smokes, I thought. Now, who is this and what the heck does she mean by all this?
Before I responded, I definitely wanted to talk to Kristy. Could she just come up if called? I mean, if I sent her an email would she see it or would it go to this S. person first?
I’d worked with kids identified with more than one personality and in one case, I had worked with a boy who had a very violent, aggressive part that would surface and not be remembered later. My good friend is a functional “multiple,” and I have long been aware of her “others,” although I have never interacted with them personally. Still, even with these experiences in my background, I had a feeling that nothing in my personal or professional experience had prepared me for what was going on within Kristy.
Could I handle this or was I getting into something way too complex, way too disturbing and way too demanding for me to be involved in?
TBC. Read the conversation which soon transpired between S. and I as I find out about this particular "alter" or ("other" part)--the one who had assumed the religious fervor in their household and complied with all that was demanded, while silently holding tremendous anger and rage.
The emails continued to fly back and forth with a kind of frenetic intensity and within a week’s time nearly a hundred emails had been exchanged. K had so many questions for me: Did I still live in Alaska? Did I smoke? Did I have others that lived inside of me the way they do? Did I remember Ms. M, one of her favorite teachers? Did I know how old she was? The questions came in a flurry, as I suppose they would from a person who woke up to discover that fifteen years had passed in spite of the fact that to them, it had only been a few days.
K wanted to know if I still worked in schools; was I married, was it bad for her to be mad at her parents and was I scared of them like she was scared of them. She wanted to know if I was aware that her parents wanted to hurt me and did I have my own mommy and daddy and were they nice. And then on August 28, she writes that Kristy had showed her my website and that she does not “like big dogs daddy made one have sex with me now I scared of them.” She ended this particular email telling me she felt kind of weird and wondered, “am I asking to many questions well I better stop I love you in a good way K.”
The lack of punctuation and immature spelling came to be a trademark “K” characteristic and although Kristy did not use much punctuation (specifically, she never inserted question marks), she did write on a much higher level than K was writing and in a very different "voice."
If my head wasn’t spinning from the residual effects of the accident, it would have been spinning from the volume, intensity and content of these emails. I was grateful that I had gotten the sanction and support of her social worker, and wanted to make sure that nothing I said or mentioned would be in conflict with whatever therapy she was receiving. I was shocked and sickened by the information provided and in my worst nightmares had not imagined abuse of this magnitude. I did not want to express my outrage in a way that would trigger her or cause a defensive reaction, but I could not just ignore the information given to me.
Is it possible that such atrocities truly exist in this world…that people could be so cruel…so sick, so intentionally destructive of a child’s life? It was almost more than I could wrap my mind around and yet the context in which things were said sounded real,--not imagined and not made up. There was the ring of truth to the content of those emails, whether they were written by the nearly thirty year old Kristy or by K—who although was supposedly fourteen, really came across more like a six or seven year old in terms of her thinking and “speaking” abilities.
Quickly I found myself getting the stress-related headaches so common since the accident—the ones which came when my brain was simply overloaded with too much information, too much stimulation. The ones that produce a brain freeze that could shut me down without warning and send me into narcoleptic sleeping bouts that might last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
Kristy, I discovered, was extremely sensitive to and concerned about me overtaxing my brain. I was enormously impressed by and fascinated by her own nurturing approach, not just to K and the “Littles” (as I was to learn she referred to the younger others), but to me as well. In an early email I had mentioned,
“I am struggling with a nasty headache today...partially from spending so much time on the computer the last few days, partially because that(as you probably know from working at the clinic) is just a function of a head injury. I always have to be careful with how much I "think", and right now, I am spending many, many hours every day writing and getting ready for the book release. I only tell you all this because if you don't hear from me, it’s possible I fell asleep! That happens alot if I overstress my brain....I just...conk out. Know that I willl be back as soon as I am able.”
Kristy’s emails often initiated with a bold faced warning to "...NOT READ UNTIL YOU FEEL UP TO IT", and she often expressed concern that the communication was too much to be good for me. Even so, although Kristy and K did talk “inside,” they were not always aware of each other’s whereabouts and doings and although Kristy was very respectful of both my time and energy, she was not always aware of just how much information K and I were exchanging (this was soon corrected by a folder system that Kristy—with K’s permission—initiated so that she could catch up on the email exchanges before contacting me). This helped lessen the number of emails substantially.
All the information and questions were coming in incredibly fast and it was impossible for me not to respond with equal rapidity. I had wondered for so many, many years what had become of this girl and I was both so horrified and drawn in by the information she was giving me, but I knew I needed to moderate my number of replies—for both our sake. Although K and Kristy seemed like two very distinct individuals, they still were coming from one body and this had to be exhausting for Kristy as well.
In my responses I was concentrating hard at not seeming therapeutic and I worried that I might not be able to hold the line as just a concerned and supportive individual in Kristy's life. I soon realized however that the utter compassion I felt and the kindness that I extended through caring words could not help but be somewhat therapeutic in their response. To make sure that no boundaries were crossed or inadvertent damage done, I got Kristy's permission to share the emails with her social worker so that a clear loop of communication was in place.
Following is an email sent in response to several of K's questions to me:
Hi!
Well my goodness, K, have you saved all these questions up for all this time???!!!!! Well, don't feel bad about asking so many of them--I did the same of Kristy when she first wrote!
Let's see…why was I in an accident? Well, not for any good reason that I can figure out! Actually, it happened on the way to work very, very early one morning...about 6:00 a.m. I was living in a real rural part of Utah then and was going to a meeting at a school quite far away...and I am not good with early morning driving because I am always sleepy in the morning. I am always most wide awake at night and usually I don't schedule meetings early and far away for this reason, but this was an unusual circumstance, so I agreed to it. It was on a Monday and I had to go to my office first to get stuff set up for the week, so I had to get up around four in the morning and be at my office by five so I could be on the road by 5:30.Unfortunately, I feel asleep driving there and rolled my truck. I didn't even hit my head, but because I was on cruise control at 55mph, the velocity of my brain slamming into my skull was quite intense. Not very smart of Ms. Sanders, was it??!!!
Yes, my dogs are big (well one is really big, one is actually kind of small by comparison) but both of them are very, very gentle. And neither one would have participated in anything like sex with a human person. Ever. Dogs have to be trained to do that, K and I am so sorry you experienced that.
Lets see...do I still work in schools? Not now, no. I did for a long, long time, but the head injury creates some problems that make it really hard...so although I do some training of teachers and counselors and I speak to groups who ask me to come talk to them, I am not working in a school like I used to do.
Am I married? Nope. I am on a solo ship on my own little sea and I have a really nice life, with wonderful friends and my two boys (that's what I call my dogs a lot of the time).I was married when you knew me, but we were divorced many years ago.
Hmmm...next...is...oh, is it bad to be mad at your parents? My own opinion on that is no, it is not bad at all...it is normal and healthy to be angry when someone doesn't treat you kindly or doesn't take care of you the way they are supposed to. Parents are supposed to protect their children, not hurt them or scare them or make them do things that are not healthy to their development. And K, I don’t think there is anything bad about you at all. I think the hardest part is over And you know what? I think the hardest part is behind you and such pain will never find its way into your life again.
As to my own parents, both have died, K, so I guess technically I don't have a mommy or daddy anymore. At least, not on this earth. But their spirits still are within me, so I kind of always feel like they are near me when I want or need them to be. Were they nice? In most ways they were, K. Like all people they each had their "issues" and sometimes those issues got in the way of their being good parents, but they were not abusive and they did not lock me up or frighten me or make me do things that would end up damaging my ability to trust people. I am grateful for that and wish it could have been so for you.
Yes, Kristy did tell me she is a lesbian and I think that’s great as long as she is in a relationship that is gentle and kind and that gives her support and love and that she can return the same to her partner. Most important to me about any relationship is that people treat each other with kindness and respect.
You know what makes me feel so happy inside, K? Hearing you say you love me in a good way...because that tells me that you know there are good kinds of loving in this world and that there is loving that doesn't hurt and that isn't confusing or full of drama.That there can be simply...loving someone. And believe me, there is nothing better, nothing healthier, nothing to treasure more than loving somebody (or a pet) in a good way and being loved back in the same sort of good way.
Know that you are cared for and loved back in that good way and not just by me, but by others as well.
Well, it’s almost 9:30 my time and I have tons to do before I go to sleep...so I better start doing it or I will be up wayyy too late. One thing about my life now is that I go to sleep a whole lot earlier than I used to. And I take naps too! As long as my brain gets a LOT of quiet time and rest, it does okay in most ways. So I shall say good night for now, K. Thanks for writing and talking with me. It’s so nice to "hear" your voice.
TTYL,
Love, Ms. Sanders
To my surprise, the following email showed up in my box at 6:30 in the morning:
I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE OR WHY YOU ARE TRYING TO CORRUPT K AGAINST OUR FATHER. HE WAS THE CHOSEN ONE TO GET TO SPEAK AND HEAR GOD. GOD TOLD HIM TO BREED AND PRODUCE FRUITS OF HIMSELF. K BROUGHT THE DEVIL INTO THE BABY SO GOD MADE HIM SACRIFICE IT. KNEEDS TO LEARN HOW TO HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.
S.
Whoa. Holy Smokes, I thought. Now, who is this and what the heck does she mean by all this?
Before I responded, I definitely wanted to talk to Kristy. Could she just come up if called? I mean, if I sent her an email would she see it or would it go to this S. person first?
I’d worked with kids identified with more than one personality and in one case, I had worked with a boy who had a very violent, aggressive part that would surface and not be remembered later. My good friend is a functional “multiple,” and I have long been aware of her “others,” although I have never interacted with them personally. Still, even with these experiences in my background, I had a feeling that nothing in my personal or professional experience had prepared me for what was going on within Kristy.
Could I handle this or was I getting into something way too complex, way too disturbing and way too demanding for me to be involved in?
TBC. Read the conversation which soon transpired between S. and I as I find out about this particular "alter" or ("other" part)--the one who had assumed the religious fervor in their household and complied with all that was demanded, while silently holding tremendous anger and rage.
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