Little Tim, Big Tim

by Tim Roy

  GARY (guilt holder) developed when the other personas were so overwhelmed that they couldn’t stop the attacks coming from numerous angles due to disassociating. Gary carried the uncomfortable sensation of not stopping the attacks. His arrival occurred at around the age of ten years.

  LITTLE BIG TIM surfaced as the body grew into puberty and Little Tim went to remain in his sanctuary of many colours. The physical changes to the body reminded him of the bad men that had harmed him. He had not developed with the others and when he surfaced to see these changes he couldn’t absorb the reality.

  At age thirteen, Mum started to use us as a surrogate husband. Recently divorced, Little Big Tim became her sex toy. A dilemma developed—Mum’s sexual activity was gentle and soft and prior to this I had suffered rough and violent homosexual acts.

  SEXY took the role of dealing with and appeasing Mum’s inappropriate sexual activity. Because this heterosexual relationship was new, to maintain the only understood experience of sex, being homosexual, I created a female energy or persona to alleviate the confusion—she was known as Lusty.

  LUSTY was suffering a vicious flogging with a jug cord for a minor altercation when

  MARK (stops the marks) suddenly appeared and grabbed the jug cord in full swing to cease the attack on Lusty. After this, Lusty went dormant. Escape from the family home came in the form of joining the Army. Suppression was survival. LITTLE BIG TIM joined the Army with MARK finishing the recruit course.

  ADDY (the addict): due to the religiously staunch ideals belted into me, consuming alcohol and drugs was not acceptable, so ADDY came to carry out those tasks.

  Mark didn’t have the right stuff to join the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) so the

  SOLDIER was created. Soldier was quite successful; however at times, when the system failed, one of the others would arise at inappropriate times.

  KLUTZ was created to avoid embarrassment for the system and to take the blame for altercations that arose. SOLDIER functioned better believing that his career was productive and progressing without any repercussions. Within the civilian world the SOLDIER is completely inappropriate to civilian ideals and behaviours, so

  MANNY (the manic one) was created. To balance this event, DOPEY (the depressed one) was designed to allow rest.

  DIGBY: present only if life was running smoothly and emotions weren’t needed to be activated.

  I have no memory of switches and could only explain this eventuality as having experienced blank spots or blackouts.

  WILLIAM (the writer) came into being and by writing we started the healing process by exposing the facts, as tainted and depraved as they were.

  BIG TIM is the one that desired integration and can now, when he is in control of the body, explain his absence and pass on the knowledge that it’s safe to integrate. He can also express information transferred from the others.

  FREEDOM BEGINS

  BIG TIM

  I walk out of the hospital accepting each persona’s beginning, their reason for being and their purpose: seventeen different personas and each of them created out of necessity. When an emotional overload occurred a persona took charge to prevent the whole system being overwhelmed. And when a new situation arose a new persona was created.

  The majority of the personas revolve around emotions and sexuality. It is extremely difficult to acknowledge that a female persona by the name of Lusty exists. The lack of belief in her validity stagnated my recovery process, as the majority of personas deny her existence.

  The writing starts to flow freely as the years are documented and each persona offers their knowledge as to why and how they existed. Lusty’s truth could no longer be denied; I finally owned the words I had written over and over again, then crumbled and discarded at my feet. I had kept discarding them, grasping the umbilical cord that fed my heterosexuality, frightened that to accept Lusty would rob me of my natural desires.

  Lusty’s story describes how she pleasured Mum because Sexy didn’t understand the process of oral sex and would become confused as these inappropriate flashes of time interconnected with other times of being with men. Sexy had to step aside so a female could save the system from imploding. Every time Lusty wrote, her truth never changed, and the writing that flowed was finally believed. When it was accepted, we had sat and cried within our allocated room, grateful that we had been hesitant to walk the halls of the hospital in case of spreading our sickness to those already sick.

  I proudly carry hundreds of foolscap pages of knowledge: pages of lost knowledge, knowledge I can accept, knowledge that is real to me, and knowledge that my truth is connecting up. I know the personas, when the personas have been involved and in which situations and incidents. In my bag are two other manuscripts: ‘Switch me off’, the necessary purge to identify events and incidents during my military career and ‘Switch’, the fact/fiction book written to organise the chaos in my mind that was my childhood and the therapy surrounding my desired recovery. The pages under my arm are a monumental start to an autobiography of the recovery journey that I am now excited to share with others. I also hope that others who have suffered like me can find some identification and solace, especially males. I will call this expose of my journey ‘Little Tim, Big Tim’.

  A smile crosses my lips as I sit in the outside garden area waiting for my ride, impatient to have the opportunity to assure and confirm with my mental health professionals that I’m starting to understand that the Personas are there. They exist, and I understand their placement in my mind as follows:

  Little Tim immerses himself in the place of many colours, where the Angels can comfort him.

  Peter sits in a comer of my mind, always crossed legged on his bottom, better to sit on the blood than to have it run down his leg. He is afraid that some adult might inquire and be repulsed by the answer.

  Troy hides in his cupboard; a dark but safe space. He has pots and saucepans at his feet, something to bang and clang when angry.

  Shane sits at the big table with his head resting on the flat surface. His arms are folded. Shane’s face is never seen. The perpetual bright stain of shame and embarrassment never fades.

  Gary lives sitting on a dam edge. The location of his first introduction to the madness is the only place of solace for him.

  He waits to warn the other children in the hope of alleviating the burden he is destined to carry.

  Little Big Tim sits in a comer and rocks. The rocking is a soothing comfort. The rapid growth and regression has exhausted him. He just moves through space with no true purpose.

  Sexy is very strong and sits by the window between reality and the safe zone. He is the first to jump the void to impress you if you’re female and intimidate you if you’re male. He knows that he has a strong body, however he’s also aware that he can control with charm.

  Lusty stands in the shower and looks at her body wishing for her breasts to grow. Alternatively, she scrubs her skin raw; her sentence of confused duality is the only reality she experiences.

  Mark, created for the purpose of stopping the marks (the attacks), lives in the safe zone doing the opposite—making marks. He has a knife in his hand. He craves for the new strategies, the new techniques, and the new lessons we need to apply to function in the world with a sense of gravity. When these new understandings come, he carves them in the table so they are always accessible. Now the information is not lost between the links of the selves. Everyone can now access the knowledge needed to get better.

  Addy is lost; he lives in the memories of all the couches he sat on getting stoned.

  Soldier alternates; he believes in prior planning and that preparation prevents a piss poor performance. He can be doing push ups in the comer with full kit on and wearing camouflage cream; the next moment he can be back at the unit (Army) at the memorial rock showing reverence to his mates that died, also wondering if he wasted his life.

  Klutz is always on the soldier’s shoulder although Soldier is still unaware of him. Klutz just i
s.

  Manny paces the room like a tiger and only surfaces when other manic people are around so he doesn’t sense that he is weird. He looks forward to psych ward visits.

  Dopey sleeps, he waits for the others to experience burnout.

  Digby today is completely integrated with Tim. There are no memories left of Digby’s. Digby memories are now Tim’s.

  Writer sits with his a pen on paper, observing.

  Big Tim utilises the pathways that have been created. He encourages integration; he sees this as safe and secure process.

  He can decipher trauma and memories and respond to and recognise the difference between them.

  The huge steel structure painted grey, criss-crosses the view of the Sydney Harbour. I playfully punch my four-year-old brother James excitedly as I strain to see the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. What a view! The smile on my face is just as big. Dad hasn’t said much about where we are going; just that we ’re to visit some of his friends!

  As I begin my autobiography, I shiver with goose bumps, but the memory holds no fear or pain, I am free.

  EPILOGUE

  THE BEGINNING

  Thank you for sharing the experience of my Recovery Journey. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to document some personas in more detail. To be honest, some personas have not exposed all of the functions and activities that they were involved in. Some personas became fragments and some just held a minor role to assist me in a major crisis in my life. I thank The Higher Power, stronger than I am, that gave a child the resources it needed to survive.

  In the past, I would have switches where I didn’t know where I was or what I was. This knowledge confirms for me that the integration process is a positive step and means that I can get back to being able to function in the real world.

  I will always honour the fact that the abuse did happen. I will always honour the fact that I will need skills and strategies to get through life, however, by accepting that, it does not debilitate me and it does not force me to be ‘less than.’

  So, while I’ve both enjoyed and suffered writing this recovery autobiography of my journey, I hope it helps someone else out there. This is really its divine purpose—to assist others to heal in conjunction with the help of mental health professionals.

  I would never deny the importance and value of the help of professionals, the twelve-step meetings and the peer support groups.

  Also, I believe that those who need help must get as much as they can from the appropriate institutions. But if something is still lacking in the wisdom they seek, I would encourage them to keep moving forward in pursuit of the answers they need.

  The answer I needed was that I had to forgive myself. I find the concept of forgiving others irrelevant, considering that most of these people who abuse children—paedophiles and such, are abusing not only one child but many. In my opinion, the only way forgiveness can work for one individual abuser is by all victims who have suffered at their hands to forgive collectively, otherwise it’s really irrelevant to forgive.

  Strange as it may sound, I truly believe that if you can forgive yourself—for the pain you put yourself through, for the lifestyle you’ve lived, for your drug and alcohol addiction, for the guilt and shame you carry, for all the ills and woes that you decided to place upon yourself—then you can obtain your freedom You must also forgive others around you for not listening to what went on around them; if you are willing to come to that stage and are able to forgive all of that, you become a complete person. For me, this is where integration becomes a reality. This means I can forgive myself.

  I forgive myself and I’m free.

  THE END

  Appendix

  Transcripts

  1. Tim interviews Dr Jan Ewing

  2. Dr Jan speaks with Little Tim

  3. Dr Jan speaks with Troy

  1. Tim interviews Dr Jan Ewing

  (verbatim)

  Tim: I want to interview you about the last three years.

  Dr Jan: Ok

  Tim: Okay I’m aware that with DID and leaving here at times I would have no memory of what was said between us or what work was given. However when I did leave here there was always something that sort of triggered within me which was a good trigger for me to work on what was appropriate. I suppose the best way to do this for the benefit of the recovery autobiography is we met three years ago, what did you think when we started.

  Dr Jan: You are going to test my memory now.

  Tim: That he’s a mess

  Dr Jan: You had childhood issues that you wanted to focus on. They (PTSD Course) were sending you to me. That was something that you identified as something you wanted to work on.

  Tim: So I actually spoke to someone about that because I have no memory of that. I only believed that I was coming here for the understanding of the combat PTSD in reference to the death of the lads and not really being able to resolve or understand how to grieve that process.

  Dr Jan: In the group program they commented that you had difficulty (in the individual sessions within the group program) that you had difficulty focusing on any one issue for too long, that you believed that many of the current problems were linked to your childhood background. And you had to revisit that to deal with that. They thought that was an issue—that until you had resolved that you couldn’t really focus on any of the other PTSD stuff and I said that was fine. I would be happy to explore that with you.

  Tim: And I thought I was a good student.

  Dr Jan: Oh well (Tim and Dr Jan laugh) It doesn’t mean you weren’t a good student. It means that actually you were a good student and that you identified what was the next thing that you had to do. You knew what was going on for you.

  Tim: I have no memory of asking for help regarding the childhood stuff.

  Dr Jan: This report is interesting from the PTSD course; you had reported history of severe childhood sexual and emotional abuse instigated by both parents. In order to cope with this situation Tim described himself as acting like a chameleon, so that he could remain in the background without being noticed.

  And you described being isolated with limited communication between your siblings. So you identified that. I think the use of chameleon is very interesting. Chameleons change in order to blend in with their environment.

  It’s an interesting description to be a chameleon isn’t it? That with each situation with its different stress levels; you could turn into a chameleon; that you could actually be a different person in each situation which would enhance your safety. So even back then you were using a description that sits very nicely with what was going on.

  Tim: Okay, in hindsight you and I have worked from a level where we understand that the DID system was extremely functional in getting me to levels like employment with the SAS. The fact that it actually probably imploded at the end of my time there and the reason I conducted the safety breaches within training. Did you feel that we worked on that specific area to get to the point where we are now or did we find that specific area of the trauma within me, for example, the felt sensation of abandonment on the beach?

  Dr Jan: I think we got to that point pretty early. We started working on that stuff for the reasons you were talking about. I actually always thought they were more of a door into where we really needed to go. But we needed to work on those to get some sort of an understanding because you always ended up coming back to the childhood issues that were being triggered by the adult PTSD things.

  Within our sessions, you would end up back in the Blue Mountains and back in that whole sort of police raid and all that sort of stuff and that took you back to those original traumas. I mean that was almost like creating a re-enactment of the whole violation and unjust invasion of boundaries in an adult sense. It was almost like going back there, life’s experiences offered a reason to recognise that you where treated unjustly. I always felt that we had to explore more.

  I actually thought that with the events like being left on the beach, there had to be some valid
ation on my part; that you needed me to know that that had happened, that it was real and that I was going to be on board with that that, of course, that would traumatise you but I’d never was all that fussed about it. Because I really felt that those events, I have no idea what happened in those events and I only take your story for it, as I guess with everything.

  I always did have some sense that these were surface manifestations of something else that was going on for you, that what was happening for you at that point was just coloured.

  So, than we would never have a clear understanding of what that was, until we went back to the childhood stuff.

  So we dealt with it fairly quickly in terms of validation and giving some understanding about what that would do to somebody having that experience. But then we needed to go very quickly to why you think that experience affected you the way it affected you, in particular at that point. Then we started to move-into childhood experiences.

  Tim: And when you say then we started to move into—was there a period of time of between you and I, I mean was there times and were there places and events that you know that you have a memory of that I don’t have a memory of?

  Dr Jan: Well it’s hard for me to know what you’ve got a memory of. I was never surprised when you would come back in sessions and say that you did not remember much of the last session and I accept that that may well have been the fact. Particularly if I had been interacting with another alter( persona) during the session, during the next session, you, the host Tim, would come out and would say that you don’t remember much of what went on or only have a very short vague memory of what went on. Then I would often tell you; sometimes I would only give you a general idea if I thought that was what you needed to know.