Olga Trujillo

I understood these things intellectually, the way I understand that the world is round or that gravity is a universal force. But it took me a long time to truly grasp what Dr. Summer had told me many times before: “To survive a violent childhood, you created aspects of your consciousness that held information about the violence away from you. That’s why you remember it as if it happened to someone else. You have many ways of being you.

I opened my eyes and felt better, exhausted but relieved of a burden. The pressure to tell and the weight of the emotions had been with me for weeks. Now that I’d told what had happened, the burden lifted a bit.

I felt a catch in my chest and a pulsing in my ears and then I felt calm and numb, with a fuzziness that I couldn’t think through, much thicker than before.

I came to understand intellectually that my mind used dissociation as a way to protect me from knowing things. Dr. Summer repeatedly explained, “If you had woken up every morning and knew that later that day or evening you would be abused, you would have killed yourself”. I would always nod, as if in agreement. It all made sense in a theoretical way, but I could not and did not want to truly understand or accept what had happened to me.

I wanted to go to a few therapy sessions and be back to normal. As I saw it, the panic attacks were the problem. What I really wanted was to stop having them. I genuinely thought I could do that. I didn’t want to think about the past.

Some of the parts inside me were ready to come up and tell what had happened, but others didn't want me to know they even existed, I learned that when parts were in conflict with each other or didn't like what I was doing, I felt pain and panic, Dr. Summer encouraged me to pay attention to the parts and address the issues they raised, but to also challenge them and keep doing as many of my normal activities as I could.

I still didn't know very much about the complex coping mechanism that had helped me survive my childhood. It was as if my conscious mind wasn't strong enough yet to fully grasp that I had parts. I knew it superficially, but I didn't feel it all the way through.

I closed my hand into a fist and captured the details of the feeling for later, when I might need them. Storing thoughts in my fist was a way of creating parts of myself, brighter rooms in the house that was my mind, parts that could hold on to feelings of being loved.

My mind instinctively developed new parts to specialize in skills I needed to make it through law school. They learned to focus on the important information: the outlines, the nutshells, and what each case meant.

When David and I went to visit my mom, she treated me well and seemed interested in our lives, focusing less on what she needed from me or how I should be taking care of her. Mom saved those conversations for our daily phone calls because she thought David wouldn't find out about this other side other. But he could see the changes in me when I talked to my mom.