Occasionally, when you had trouble remembering something, you asked me what I thought happened next. Invariably, if I ventured a guess, the missing part then came to you, but it was never what I had guessed. Often it was less severe than I had imagined. For example, they might hit you only once, but tell you how lucky you were; They said they were the kindest parents in the world, that any other parents would have “spanked” you within an inch of your life!

Both your physical and psychological symptoms are consistent with your memories to a degree that could not be just coincidence. For example, your lack of motility of the colon, which provided the rationale for your seven abdominal surgeries, and, which continues to be a problem for you despite the surgeries, is consistent with being made to eat your own feces. If you knew you might have to eat it, you would make Herculean efforts not to produce it! Having been made to remain on your hands and knees for hours, in “tushi-up position”, waiting to be tortured, or while being hit to “make your little tushi red”, it is hardly surprising that you still react with panic to seeing a teddy bear or other stuffed animal face down. Accidentally touching your right ear causes spasms of terror. The same is not true of the left ear. It was the right ear they threatened to cut off if you didn’t kill a cat or dog at their command. When you regressed in therapy, it was always to age five or age two. Later we realized that age five was when you were first made to kill an animal. Much later we realized that age two was when your sister was five and you witnessed her kill an animal! We traveled together to the place you lived from age three to age eight. Everything you had told me about it was just as you had described it, including the way the house was isolated so that abuse could take place without discovery. There is other corroboration, e.g., a childhood friend who remembers that your room was repeatedly filled with teddy bears one week, and bereft of them the next week. Other consistencies are too numerous to mention.

My training had been largely to break through defenses, not to unearth memories, but to get in touch with the feelings associated with them, and the messages learned from them that might still be operative in the present. When we breached your defenses, you became a five-year-old, or a two-year-old, and often couldn’t put the adult back in charge for hours! You can’t tell a five-year-old to drive home, so we were sometimes in my office until the wee hours of the morning! We sought consultation. Dale McCulley (see his response) was most helpful, instructing us over the phone how to keep the adult present while allowing the child to come out. It was important to address the adult directly as the session began, asking her to stay present. During the session, while working with the child part, the therapist frequently had to call on the adult part for comment and advice. When we followed these steps, the adult was able to function when it was time to go home.

While you are clearly dissociative, you do not qualify as a multiple personality. Both the adult and the child parts are clearly Lois. Furthermore, each is aware of the activities and thoughts of the other.