LEARNING TO TRUST
In the Temple, 2023, digital
I stood in a dark temple in the rain forest, facing a new friend. Her hands clasped my wrists as I stood shakily before her, the world seeming to vibrate around me and within. I felt barely able to stand as my stomach churned wildly, still roiling from the pipe-full of tobacco smoke I had (more or less) swallowed — a task bestowed upon me by the healer I had traveled to seek help from. My friend’s face was a solid darkness fading at the edges into the shadows around us, the whites of her eyes reflecting dim flecks of blue moonlight. She looked into my eyes and I peered back through the film of tears that had arisen when she took my arms. She sang in a voice like honeyed roses and blew gently upon my forehead before embracing me. “You are strong,” she whispered “Your spirits are with you.”
When I arrived at the healer’s camp I had not spoken to anyone about multiplicity. Indeed, I had traveled there to seek help with physical ailments no doctors had been able to solve. At that time I was still coming to terms with accepting myself as part of a system* rather than being an individual. It was just sinking in that I had not been alone the past decade and that the others weren’t interested in hiding any longer.
This realization upended my sense of self and reality which degraded my self-trust. Along with not trusting my intuition, I spiraled into self-doubt and began identifying with the labels of madness I/we had been given long ago. Delusion, I thought, was controlling my life. But after several healing ceremonies, I began to question my self-deprecation: others around me were mentioning spirits I had never talked about.
The next morning my friend shared what she had seen the night before. She told me how she had seen two spirits with me, one made of light and the other made of shadow. The light spirit stood on my left and was very protective. The shadow, she said, stood on my right and appeared very powerful. They protected me and the light spirit, but also drained us both. At first I was confused and a bit frightened — these were things I had tried to forget about, things that had led to pain in the past. This initial fear quickly faded, however, as I settled into the realization that someone outside of this body had seen us. Someone who knew nothing about our past had accurately described two of us.
To be seen and validated by others in a non-clinical context was world-altering, to say the least. Particularly as this encounter was not isolated — throughout my stay at the healer’s camp, others witnessed and described our multiple spirits in ways that astonished me. After having spent a decade internalizing labels of madness — “you’re making this all up”, “you’re delusional”, “do even you know who you are? — it was a release to no longer bear the invisible alone. At last, I was validated. For the first time, we were seen. To be authentically witnessed and accepted is to be freed from the chains of societal demands for homogeneity. This tiny acknowledgement of existence was enough to open the doors to healing ourselves and our system.
Sometimes all it takes for a person to begin believing in themselves is for someone else to believe in them too.
* System is a term used by some multiples to describe the collective of individuals who share a single body. Systems contain at least two individuals.