Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

number of cases are being treated.
Researchers believe that children develop multiple personalities as a way of coping with
abuse so violent and sadistic that the mind fractures. Each assault is then handled by
one or more personalities —"selves," or "alters." Some personalities hold pain, others
grief, others rage. Even happiness may be segregated into a discrete "self." The
personalities often have no knowledge of one another, so a person with MPD "loses
time " when one personality gives way to another, and can "come to" hours or years later
without any way of knowing what had happened in the interim.
Brad, a victim of incest who suffers MPD, has learned to recognize a particular feeling
that warns him he is about to switch into one of his alters. It happens under stress, he
says. "My eyes all of a sudden blur and everything goes to gauze."
Cult
I met another sufferer of multiple personalities—a young woman—the day after she fled
a cult. My husband and I were guests of the people she ran to, and I sat up with her
until early morning because she was afraid to be alone. She had been sexually tortured
by her father, brothers, and other cult members for all of her 28 years. As we talked, she
switched personalities.
One of her alters was suicidal. Another wanted to call her family and tell them where
she was. One was very young, five or six. One knew the dates of satanic holidays and
the rituals she had performed on them. At one point during the night she closed her
eyes, then opened them again and looked at me with such an evil stare that the hair on
my neck stood up. Later, she asked me to put my arms around her and hold her, and I
did.
"I was my mother's gift to my father," says Sylvia, yet another woman who suffers multiple
personalities. "My dad's a pedophile. He had sex with me until I was seven. My
mom's a sociopath. She tried to suffocate me many, many times. She slept with my
brother until he was fourteen. She made him her husband, even though my father lived
with us. The last time I saw her was twenty years ago. I came by the house where she
was living with my brother. He opened the door with a gun in his hand. She had told him
to shoot me."
Sylvia and her family lived in a cult that practiced blood sacrifices. When she was three,
she was ritualistically raped and sodomized by the cult leaders. Her life was so torturous
that she split into alternate selves who carried on when she couldn't.
What a Child Learns from being sexually abused
"The one thing a child learns from sexual abuse," Dr. Summit told me, "is how to be
abused." Sexually abused children teach themselves to endure assault. Instead of
learning to protect themselves, they learn that they can't protect themselves. As adults
they can be blind to dangers others would find obvious. They may freeze or go limp
when threatened. Someone who has never been abused can say no, can walk or run
away, can scream and fight. The incest victim often doesn't know what to do except to
wait for the danger to be over.
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