PART 2. NOT ALL ADULTS ARE ADULT 3 JUNE 2016

PART 2. NOT ALL ADULTS ARE ADULT: A discussion on helping child alters of t.b.m.c. & immature adults. It lines up with my desire to care for DID survivors & traumatized hurting people. Part 1 was entitled “The importance of child alters for helping t.b.m.c.” This second part discusses ideas that can be applied to both immature child alters of DID survivors, as well as immature adults w/out DID. It is based upon my experience working with child alters and childish adults who suffer from arrested development. Examining the dynamics of immaturity will explain some baffling behavior that some people exhibit. Just as talents & meds can have more than one application, so also my therapeutic suggestions. (In line with old school style, I use the male pronoun for everyone.)

MATURITY v. IMMATURITY. For this article, the maturity under discussion is emotional & spiritual, not physical. Maturity happens in stages & does not necessarily happen evenly in the time periods & various aspects of a person. Mental maturity is central to living responsible competent lives. The mature person has grown from the state of weak helplessness to strong competence. The mature person is reasonable & fair. He has developed his God-given gifts (aka self-actualization) & grown wise in character (see Proverbs on wisdom). He is willing to accept his role in life & its responsibilities. The mature person understands cause & effect, situational awareness, what is fitting for a situation and has the ability to communicate & work with his fellow man. He can synthesize ideas into a unified concept. Note: the mature person is a continually maturing person—his growth is not arrested. One can also give consideration how some denominations stunt the spiritual growth of their converts by leading them to think they have arrived & are finished. The best example of spiritual maturity I could provide is Christ; to give some examples, his ability to forgive & empathize, and to stand for what is right in the midst of a crazy world. Meanwhile immature religiosity has been documented to exacerbate mental pathologies.

IMMATURITY. We are born immature, helpless, bawling infants. The baby thinks only of its needs, & its bundle of needs have a valid claim to its caretakers’ attention. It has little sense of time & little sense of cause & effect in the larger world. For instance, it does not understand the danger of running out in the street. And its mind is excited by life & goes in all kinds of directions. What the child sees & hears—it imitates. If it witnesses insecurity, irresponsibility, fear & abuse, that is what the child learns. Its communication skills are basic, so it achieves what it wants by screaming and letting its caretakers figure it out. Lots of screaming angry small child splits in the older t.b.m.c. systems would be grouped into armies that would flood the consciousness of front alters trying to do deprogramming. You can’t reason with a screaming angry child part, and certainly not hundreds of them. With trauma based mind control, which begins the initial splitting of the mind at the targeted age of 18 months, most of the victim’s mind is split into dissociative pieces that will never live day-to-day in the real world. Their growth is stopped at the moment they are created by the trauma (that made them). Splits at this age are prior to the child even developing its identity fully. It takes a while for the baby after birth to separate its identity from its mother…and that bond…unless hijacked by the programmers, which it is…would naturally be the strongest one. The child is trauma bonded to its programmers.

CRIME RATE A FUNCTION OF IMMATURITY & CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS. When I taught criminals in prison (I taught all high school subjects for 5 yrs.) I noticed most could not really track cause & effect. That explains why they did crimes & why neither the laws (nor a conscience) acted as preventions. Traumas in childhood arrest the maturing process & prevent the formation of cause & effect skills and empathy. So it was not difficult to realize that our crime rate in part is caused by immaturity which in turn is being caused by childhood traumas. Getting to know some of the men, even provided me with the specifics of it all. The home, the school, & the church are to function as maturing agencies—but many times they have no sense of having that task. The advantage of the t.b.m.c. is that it hides all this immaturity. The ability to do crimes without any sense of cause & effect or conscience or awareness exacerbates the programming within the child dissociative pieces. A delta assassination alter & a beta sexual alter are often child parts that are doing (on fear of death) what they have been programmed to do, with no counterbalance in their thinking to cause second thoughts. Early on, I concluded MPD was the ultimate vehicle for irresponsible acts. However, I came to admire many front alters (that is the part who held the body enough to be aware of the chronological age) who felt guilt & responsibility for what their irresponsible child alters did. For instance, a Christian minister’s wife who was DID, honestly felt responsible for what her Beta alters did, even though they did it without the front alter’s approval.

EXPEDITING THE MATURATION PROCESS. So how do the immature mature? I think when we are speaking of DID parts or non-DID adults with issues, all need good mature examples. In a number of t.b.m.c. survivors, the little parts consider the host (front alter) like their mother or daddy. This means that IF the front host alter is mature, that host’s good example of maturity helps smaller parts naturally grow up. Of course, the child parts need the same parenting that any mature child required, which includes the parent role model needs to be consistent & stable. Now, there is a natural function of the mind that I have not seen mentioned before. All alters within a system are able to tap into a pool of common knowledge. I have seen a particular skill run through much of a system, and alters will not know where they got the ability. However, for such a thing to occur it must not be something sensitive that gets lumped into the dissociative process. Let’s say for instance, the ability to thread a thread thru a needle. There is no programming against it. There is no negative connotation to it. So the skill subtly leaks through a system, and unless the skill goes against the self-image of a part, it can be absorbed. So maturity can subtly leak, if the front alter has it. If not, the example of maturity is going to have to come from the therapist or helpful friend, which is less effective because the small parts will have little contact with a therapist in comparison to the host alter. Another powerful tool to expedite maturity is to dismantle the emotional block caused by the offending childhood trauma. While I am not big on Freud, he did discover the power of catharsis & opening up the trauma block to the light of analysis to remove its power. For DID survivors this is called memory work.

BENCHMARKS OF MATURITY. Researchers into maturity have identified a number of key factors involved—and every one of these key factors is destroyed by the t.b.m.c. programmers…it speaks highly of some survivors that their host alters achieve such high levels of maturity in spite of the total interference of the maturation process. So I will now cover key factors identified by others: “Personal development deals with maturation of a healthy ego & identity (in its broadest sense), including intellectual, emotional…(A) A HEALTHY EGO and IDENTITY…boy! Two things the programmers destroy. Maturity has been documented to be a function of healthy spirituality, and spiritual maturity has been determined to include a number of items, for starters, “restraint of spirit” (self-control) mention at PRV 25:28. This verse describes a person with no self-control as a city without a defense. That is exactly someone with DID. The person has no control over their parts, they are literally a city with no defense from the evil sadistic programmers. Other aspects of spiritual maturity include 1. KNOWING God’s Leadership & direction, 2. ACCEPTING God’s love, & 3. Repentance & responsibility. All of these are stripped away or prevented by the t.b.m.c. programmers. The survivor receives programming not to be able to accept God’s love. A lengthy non-Christian study of maturity determined that MINDFULNESS and SPIRITUALITY are key to personal maturity. Again, if we see the study’s definition of these terms, we see that Christ was mature, and the programmers try to prevent these from truly developing.(B) Another psychologist researcher into maturity noted its connection to LOVE.(C) A number of researchers have said a mature person is one who accepts reality (incl. knowing yourself).

FINAL THOUGHTS. Maturity is an ongoing process of wisdom. Spiritual maturity is encouraged throughout the Bible, & the best example we have is Christ. Unfortunately, DID survivors have their child parts programmed not to receive Christ or his love (esp. deeper child parts), even if the host is Christian (some hosts are only allowed a New Age light side). Some beneficial helps were mentioned…incl. a mature host alter, a mature therapist & friend. Life itself breaks down the isolation and immaturity of parts. Whether one is DID or not, working with the trauma blockages (bad memories) that arrest development can allow the person to get on with maturing. Discovering & accepting reality is part of the maturing process.

(A) Boucouvalas, Marcie. “Towards Transpersonal Adult Development” in Adult Learning (1 FEB 2016) publ. Falls Church, p. 30. Transpersonal psychology is a system approach to the whole person and advocates holotropic healing (healing by moving to wholeness) (B) Jong, Hawlin Wu. “Mindfulness & Spirituality as predictors of personal maturity…” in Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Vol. 16, No.1 Jan. 2013, pg. 38-57. (C) See studies/writings of Eric Fromm