I finished reading "Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse" by Alison Miller, and it was filled with incredibly useful information for those who struggle with a dissociative identity disorder. It was also filled with descriptions of some of the most extreme and atrocious kinds of abuse, so to anyone wanting to read it, there's a trigger warning for cult abuse, rituals, childhood sexual abuse, satanic rituals, child trafficking, child murder, brainwashing, mind control, and every form of religion used against the mind of a child.
I was reading this book to figure out if I had gone thru any kind of abuse of the sort, and I didn't, one of my abusers was utilizing religion against me and had done enough of brainwashing to construct several brainwashed and controlled parts, who were still under the influence, but that was it. The book is extremely clear and it will not confuse you about what happened to you, it tells you the intention behind every type of abuse, and often, how to resolve the results. The books also notes that the word 'alter' is triggering to those who went thru ritual abuse and developed a dissociative identity disorder, for similarity with the word 'altar', which is used in rituals, so they prefer to use the terms 'insiders' and 'parts', which I found to enjoy as well.
One of the repeating points in the first half of the book was on insiders who pretend to be something else, for instance, insiders who pretend to be your abusers, pretend to be demons, pretend to be gods or powerful entities, who believe it's their job to hurt you, or to control you, who are made to bring out consequences if you attempt to act against your abusers. I had something like that in my head, but I had refused to believed it was an insider, because it looked just like a case of 'internalized abusive voice', and I had fought against it viciously and focused on shutting that voice down and keeping it scared, often via imagined torture if it was making me feel anxious. Reading about these other scary entities, who would, when asked, admit to just being an insider pretending, I became curious enough to engage with the abusive voice and ask it, 'are you just an alter pretending'? The voice laughed at me and admitted to being found out, and then promptly stopped pretending and showed themselves as a child part. It took me several weeks to admit to myself that this was real, because it was mortifying. I had fallen for the trick, and even tortured a child part for doing their assigned job – this part now believed their only function was to be tortured. I feel responsible for that. But there was no way for me to know. Insiders are good at keeping up a pretense.
You can sometimes recognize that an entity in your head that is scaring you, claiming to be able to control you or triggering you on purpose, or pretending to be evil, demonic, terrifying, animalistic, powerful, magical, godly, is actually a child part, just because they often act the version of that thing that a child would believe is real. If your entity is often repeating the same lines, only knows 1 way of behaviour and has predictive responses, believes to be your abuser or something similar to it, doesn't follow any real-life logic and seems to belong to another world that a child would think is accurate, then it's likely a child part, for some reason programmed or brainwashed to believe they're what they're pretending to be. I should note that when children think of these scary entities, they're often very creative, and put their whole heart in it, so it's going to be an entity that is engaging, feels powerful, doesn't back down easily. Parts who pretend to be evil or demonic will sometimes cling to what they think they are very dearly and will not allow themselves to think of themselves as humans or children, this is for their own emotional protection. All they had in their childhood was being tough. They cannot let that go.
Another incredibly useful information I got from the book was on how to process trauma if you are a multiple. I had never seen instructions on how to do this before, and I'm going to share them in another post that should be posted right after this one, and I'll put a link to it here.
