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Grieving Over the Childhood That Never Existed

Shirley J. Davis
7 min readJul 12, 2019

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Photo by Senjuti Kundu on Unsplash

Discovering you have a severe mental health problem, such as dissociative identity disorder (DID), causes a lot of chaos in a person’s life. You feel betrayed by your own mind and often afraid of the parts of your psyche that make you who you are.

However, the fear and chaos experienced when receiving the diagnosis of DID is nothing when compared to the grieving process of a childhood devoid of joy.

Today we’re going to examine grieving over the childhood that never existed.

Why Now? Why Didn’t I remember Before?

The questions above are important ones to allow yourself to ask. After all, your life has been severely impacted by the knowledge you had suppressed for years.

The answer is simple, you have reached a point in your life where emotionally you can afford to examine what happened in your childhood.

As children, people who were abused could not allow the truth of how horrendous you were being treated. For a child to admit to themselves that the people they desperately want to take care of and love them are harming them instead is akin to emotional suicide.

Instead, multiples have found a new way to cope; dissociation. While dissociation is something everyone experiences, multiples…

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Shirley J. Davis
Shirley J. Davis

Written by Shirley J. Davis

I am an author/speaker/grant writer in the U.S. My passion is authoring information about mental health disorders, especially dissociative identity disorder..

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