About DIS and complex DIS (CDIS)

Those who study satanic ritual abuse soon come across the term DIS, or dissociative identity disorder. But what is it and what does it have to do with satanic ritual abuse? In order to answer this question, we must begin by asking how children and adults in general deal with pain.

Dealing with pain

Every child needs ways of dealing with the pain that often accompanies life in this world. This can be physical pain (a fall on the knee, a molar that has to be pulled) or emotional pain (being excluded from a group, disappointment in a friend who suddenly doesn't stand you anymore, etc.). ). In a healthy family, parents are there to reassure the child, comfort him, distract him when pulling a molar or give him a little pampering after a difficult experience. As the child grows older, they learn to manage moderate pain themselves in a healthy way, without direct support from a parent. But even emotionally healthy adults continue to rely on other people for support in very difficult or painful situations. Research has shown, for example, that when adults are in pain, stress levels in the body decrease when someone else holds their hand. [1] . This effect is even greater if there is an emotional bond with the other person.

What is dissociation?

When there is pain in a child's life and there is no adult available to help the child deal with the pain, a child is forced to develop other ways. A child may, for example, vent the pain through aggressive behaviour towards other children or push the pain so far away that it can no longer be felt. In the latter case, the ability to experience positive feelings such as joy and connectedness also diminishes and often the child becomes gloomy or even depressed.

If the pain is too overwhelming and does not fit in with anything the child has experienced so far (e.g. rape), dissociation may occur: the child's consciousness splits: one part 'switches off', another part sees, feels and experiences the emotional and physical pain of the rape. Later, when there is a trusted adult to whom the child can relate and from whom they receive support, the event can still be processed and stored as a normal (but unpleasant) memory. If that adult is not present, the rape can be 'forgotten' for a long time.

What is dissociative identity disorder?

When children experience many severe traumas at a young age (before the age of 6) with no or insufficient support from an emotionally available adult, the brain develops differently from a child that grows up in more or less 'normal' circumstances. A dissociative identity disorder (DIS) may then develop. This means that at least two separate personalities develop that differ in their level of development, in their behaviour, way of talking, moving and feeling and in what they remember of their own life history. Usually there is an 'everyday life person part' and a 'trauma person part', which keeps the memories of the traumas. The result is that the daily life part of the person sometimes misses pieces of time: moments when the other trauma person part has 'taken over' the body for a while. This is usually because something happens in everyday life that touches on the traumas that have been experienced (a 'trigger'). This may be a smell that was also present at the time of the trauma (e.g. the smell of semen), an object that the person suddenly sees (e.g. a hat worn by the rapist), but also a sound or a certain touch. In order to protect the consciousness of the largest part of the person from remembering these traumas, the trauma part takes over the body for a while. This is an unconscious and automatic process, which helps the person as a whole to keep functioning, despite serious unprocessed traumas.

What is deliberately created DIS?

A trauma section can be split again by new trauma of a different nature.

For example, by not only raping a child who has already been split up by rape, but also nearly drowning her in a new situation (waterboarding), the trauma part splits up again. The trauma part had already 'learned' to endure the feelings of being raped, but not yet to experience the intense feelings of near-drowning at the same time. A new part of the person emerges in situations where both rape and near-drowning are involved.

By bringing a split-off person part into a new traumatic situation, a new trauma part splits off from this part. From this point, splitting can be continued by adding new extreme experiences. This is not just about new forms or levels of pain. The bond with the person doing the torturing can also be a reason for a new split. A person to whom the child has first attached (for a short time) and who then brutally rapes or tortures them can also cause a new cleavage. Withholding the child from food, water or sleep for a long time, or exposure to extreme heat or cold can, in combination with other circumstances, also cause further splitting. From the point of view of a sick and evil mind, the possibilities of splitting are almost endless.

Some of these created personae are 'trained' in sex work, others in participating in satanic gatherings, others in serving very specific sexual and sadistic desires of a particular group of people or, in the case of some victims, participating in human trafficking or organised crime. There are also personality groups whose task is to report information about their own lives to a person in the cult who has responsibility for this victim. The 'training' of these person-parts is accompanied by humiliation, punishment or torture of the person-part if the tasks are not performed perfectly enough. Each person part is also given a name, a mark or a number. In this way they can be called forward by the perpetrators at a time of their choosing. In addition to the parts of the person that have a task in the outside world, small and less developed parts of the person are also created that have a task to disrupt the inner world when larger parts of the person start talking about trauma. Also, person parts are created that have a very specific, defined task in the outside world, for example automatically opening the door for a specific perpetrator or being able to understand finger language or other code language. These parts of the personality are often conditioned by means of electroshock or other torture techniques.

In the course of childhood, a complex inner world is created in this way, with personal parts with their own sense of self that differ in age, size, skills and memory content.

The parts of the personality are more or less separated by memory walls. Some parts of the person don't even know of each other's existence, others know of each other but stay far away from each other. As far as I know, there is always one part of the person that has been kept out of all traumas and 'does' large parts of normal daily life. This part of the person is used to missing blocks of time from an early age and has developed all kinds of ways to conceal this from the outside world and from themselves.

The above description of deliberately created DIS is based on Esther's intensive treatment. Because the cult activated person parts for years through external triggers to perform their trained task, it was necessary in therapy to process all traumas connected with this. This was a very intensive process, but it was the only way to keep Esther out of the cult's hands, although in the first few years they sometimes managed to lure her into a trap via a small part of the personality that was not yet known.

The experiences from Esther's treatment are consistent with what has been written elsewhere about purposefully created DIS but complements this knowledge, especially when it comes to the difference between splitting and training trauma. Within Friends of Esthers counselling, we have chosen to refer to purposefully created DIS as 'complex DIS' or CDIS. This is a simpler term, more or less in line with the distinction made in the international literature on trauma between PTSD and complex PTSD. To our knowledge, to date, there is no commonly used term in the international literature for a dissociative identity disorder deliberately created by an organised perpetrator network. Sometimes the term 'programmed DIS' or DIS 2.0 is used. We therefore use the term complex DIS, abbreviated CDIS.  

In treating other adults with purposefully created DIS (henceforth: CDIS), both my own clients and clients of colleagues with whom I co-counsel, I see many similarities to Esther's process. But there are also differences. There is still a world to be gained in this in terms of growth in knowledge, but at least I think I see the following patterns:

• The extent to which clients can already make contact with their personal parts depends on the extent to which they have faced their traumas.
• If the abuse continues in the present, the inner distance between parts of the person, but possibly also the accessibility of certain parts of the person, is greater than when the abuse has already stopped.
• The more severe, long-lasting and cruel the abuse and torture, the more complex the inner world and the greater the distance or even enmity between parts of the person. More on the latter can be read in this item, under the heading 'divide and conquer'.
• By extension, possibly, the more 'professional' the local cult group that the DIS creates in a victim, the better the different parts of the person are separated and the better a victim can function 'normally' in society.
• Besides, every person is different and complex DIS will also look different in everyone.

So like any mental illness, there are all kinds of gradations in complex DIS. In addition, there are various stages of awareness in a survivor, as I have seen with Esther, among others. When I compare Esther's complex DIS with literature and her own other experiences, her inner world seems to be an extreme in terms of complexity. This fits with the fact that she tells of abuse in the very highest circles of our society and of very diverse areas where she was 'used'. Not just for sex work and satanic gatherings, but also for organised crime and having to (help) blackmail high-ups.

In summary, deliberately created DID is the abuse of a natural defence mechanism that helps one to live through severe unprocessed trauma. This is used by the cult to maximise the abuse of their victims and yet allow them to function seemingly normally in society. A survivor can live next door or a child victim can be in your child's class without you noticing. It is my hope that with increasing knowledge of signals, more children and adults will be freed from the grip of this horrific abuse.

The text above has tried to describe dissociative identity disorder (DIS) and purposefully created DIS in plain language. You can find more about DIS in psychologists' language on the internet. There you can also find the official description of DIS in the DSM-V, the 'handbook' for mental disorders used by psychiatrists and psychologists worldwide. Complex DIS as defined here is not (yet) found in the DSM-V. This text is written for a wide audience, should any reader have content or textual improvement suggestions, I would be happy to hear them via the contact page of www.lichtopsrm.com.

Aline Terpstra

10 July 2022