Talk about your thoughts with regard to being abused by a family member, and dealing with the fact that no other family members were aware (or they “don’t remember”).
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
in my family, the physical abuse was fairly open–a lot of it happened in front of other people in the family, so it wasn’t something that was quite so hidden. the other stuff… some aspects were pretty obvious, and other aspects were hidden.
one thing i’ve noticed with my own family is that memory tends to come and go. i mean, sometimes people would remember something having happened, and talk about it, but the next time you talk about it, they didn’t believe it had happened at all. (yeah, dissociation runs in my family. why do you ask? i was fifteen before i found out that most people *could* remember their childhoods. i thought everyone forgot.)
i kind of always accepted that people wouldn’t notice, or remember, or admit it if they did. i know i did some of that myself. i had a hard enough time coping with what happened to ME, and there wasn’t any way i could do anything about what was happening to my siblings.
and there’s the aspect of different people in my family remembering even the same event differently. or remembering something happening at a different time (maybe something similar that we think is the same event, but isn’t really? i don’t know.)
what’s harder for me is when a family member doesn’t remember something they did. and at this point, having paid attention to the ways they dissociate, i do think they literally don’t remember, and aren’t just denying.
It is amazing how much adults block out of their minds or truly don’t see because they can’t allow something like “that” to happen in Our family. Even now, as little memory that I do have of my past, I remember an event that I am positive really happened where my mom was there as a passive observer, and I asked her about it now and she swears it never happened. I think she can’t bear the thought that she was there and did nothing about it.