It Won’t Hurt None shares your story about healing from childhood abuse and trauma and realizing you have Dissociative Identity Disorder as well as PTSD. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I love to write – and have since I was quite young. Writing is my creative conduit to express myself and so when I sat down and started writing in the depths of my post-surgery decline, it felt like an intuitive part of the healing process. I find expressing myself to family difficult, even today, and writing the book helped me say quite a few things that I’ve not felt safe to say to those around me – particularly my parents. I suppose that not feeling “heard” throughout my life is part of the reason why I needed to write the book. To find my voice and be heard by others, even strangers, after so many years. The response to the book from other writers, and particularly from other survivors, has been wonderful and overwhelming. To know that people have read my story and now my truth is part of a larger discussion helped me remember that the abuse wasn’t my fault. Telling my story put the final piece into my healing journey by giving me a sense of control over my own narrative.

I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

I suppose one of the reasons why the book is so candid is that I don’t know how to write any other way – I assume that people want to read a story that sounds like we’re having coffee together. By far the most difficult passages to write were of the interactions between myself and my alters – my personalities. Writing chapters 13, 14, 15, and 18 was made even more complicated by the fact that I was going through a final phase of somatic work while I was writing. That wasn’t intentional but that’s how it turned out. So as I was writing about the conversations with 5, 6, 7, and 13, I was doing powerful healing work with my coach. It was humbling but also exposed some deep emotional scars. The chapter I wrote about my alter 7 was touching and kind. The first draft of the chapter about my alter 13 was not kind at all – I didn’t have any love for her. (My beta reader pointed that out.) I had to learn how to love all of them while I wrote and while I went through the somatic work – it was like swallowing two huge doses of medicine all at once. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that approach to anyone else – it was complicated to keep my mental health on track at the time – but the end result was transformational for me and the chapters turned out pretty well.

What is a common misconception you feel people have about DID?

People confuse DID with schizophrenia. They’re entirely different. I also think that some mental health disorders get big labels and they confuse people so society tends to create a lot of stigma around DID, Bipolar disorder, etc. because medicine makes them unapproachable – intangible. The fact is people probably meet people with DID more often than they realize. We live perfectly normal lives on the outside – inside our minds is another story.

What do you hope is one thing readers take away from your story?

If you want to heal, you need to take agency of your body and mind and get help. You will be challenged by bad medicine, bad doctors, misinformation, people who tell you to stop talking about it, people who won’t support you – there will be several hurdles in your path to healing. It’s your task to keep going. Do not give up. Find someone – somewhere – who can be your advocate. Someone that will support you through your healing journey and who will also call you out on your nonsense when you get stuck in your own swirl. You only need one – find that person. They can be your friend, neighbor, or someone you meet online who lives on the other side of the world. Everyone needs a cheerleader as they work through their mental and physical health issues. This isn’t a journey you’re designed to take alone. (Can I mention that I also co-authored a journal to start the healing process? It’s called “Hurt No More – Grow a Foundation for Healing”.

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