I never actually thought I was crazy, except for when I did. But usually I was sure I didn’t and had never thought I was crazy, despite knowing I had definitely experienced the feeling before.

I would have bet my life against anyone who wagered that I’d be sitting here talking about how the different versions of me that exist in my head spent years wary of tipping me off to their existence while dominating my experience, questioning my identity and making me doubt my sanity about my own sanity. But here we are.

One of the biggest challenges of trying to understand what I was experiencing on any sort of clinical, or at least functionally diagnostic level, was my inability to know if my experience was actually different - or if I was just significantly worse at managing it than others.

I was looking for self in the world while the self I experienced felt like a shape-shifting demon, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or the sheep, or the disembodied observer watching it unfold from above, or all of them or some of them.

Every time I thought I caught myself in the act, the self I thought I saw would perform a new shape to hide long enough that I would stop searching, like a Grand Theft Auto police force once the alert stars all fade and the normal sounds of the external world once again become the most audible track.

“I - in the intended me sense” am not the GTA player character, hiding from the cops. I’m the NPC police. The part of me evading the police so I don’t figure out I’m not in control, is the one holding the controller, not me.

The intended me is wearing a fake badge, carrying a toy gun and thinks he’s in charge. In reality, he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for, just that the alarm has been raised. He doesn’t know where the alarm is coming from or really even understand what an alarm means when it goes off… just that there’s a lot of commotion, loud noise and something doesn’t fucking feel right. He thinks he’s hunting for an intruder. He’s not. He’s just desperate to make the alarm stop blaring so everything can go back to normal for a little while.

The experience now is one of realizing I spent decades living with the illusion of control and authority over my own mind, thinking I was just bad at the game.

Before we go any further, I suppose I should roll the opening credits so you can start to get to know the cast of characters that are all played by me in the movie of my life.

The Echo Child

The echo child represents the version of me that forced the original internal split as a way to allow me to stop consciously experiencing the never ending uncertainty and terror of my life starting at around 5 or 6 years old.

I am using the term terror intentionally here, to represent psychological abuse and the constant threat of severe physical violence - the method of control through sustained fear and uncertainty - despite the minimal actual physical violence I actually endured. Not as a way of escalating my trauma above other forms of abuse, but to objectively describe the vessel used to administer the abuse as terror, and being trapped in an inescapable fight, flight, freeze or fawn state where fawn often didn’t work and freeze was the only remaining option.

The echo child was found through the journaling I did at the start of March 2026 following my breakup with the woman I love at a soul level still today. He was trapped because the frozen state of my adaptive responses had never evolved to understand that the war they were built to fight had ended decades before.

So how do you find someone you don’t know lives inside your inner experience somewhere without knowing they exist or that it’s even possible for them to exist?

For me it was a combination of what feel like fortunate events in the right series at the right time, and being in the right place to receive the message. Not fortunate in spite of the catalyst itself feeling like being kicked while I was down, but because the kicking dealt the fatal blow to the security door that was keeping him securely housed in a place I had no clearance to access.

The first fortunate event was ending up with Kelly. My system had developed a commitment to staying out of any relationship that could threaten to destroy the facade of internal function - which was every relationship that required “us” to be present with somebody else’s emotions without trying to control them.

I say fortunate for a number of reasons, but the one most relevant here is that it represented the first crack in the windshield that was driving me towards an arms-length, you can never hurt me if you don’t get close to me relationship with romance.

She represented the first time the intended me started trying to speak up for its own right to love and be loved. It would be a long time before those pleas would make it past the lips and a longer time still before it took shape in the geist as something that could be actively pursued in any capacity.

The first active pursuit was battling with the self-referential insanity of what it meant to “love yourself” when you don’t already. How can I love myself when I’m watching myself do and say things that I’m ashamed of, or that take me farther away from feeling worthy of the love of others?

How can I stop doing those things if I’m still doing them while consciously knowing they are the exact opposite of who I want to be - even in the moment? While I’m watching myself defy my best interest when the only reward is distance from the connection I spend every day hoping to find.

It felt physically impossible to be someone I could love, the harder I tried, the more it felt like trying to slam harder on the brakes when you start spinning out on a patch of black ice.

If I’m being honest, I don’t know if I’ve fully resolved that even still right now, from an integrated “my whole self believes I deserve love unconditionally” perspective, but we’re getting there (aren’t we, guys?).

The last few years has been about the realization that I had not dealt properly with processing the events of my childhood and accepting that every single symptom and indication of complex trauma (cPTSD) was relevant to my experience of life in one way or the other. Even the ones that weren’t relevant provided clarity about some aspect of my experience with shame, blame, sadness, anger, fear or isolation.

It felt like I had finally found the source and therefore the solution, but again I was so much farther away than I could have ever known - even to where I am right now. Truthfully I have no real sense of how much farther this journey of self-discovery and healing is going to take me in directions I still don’t know I’m about to travel.

I lived for decades with multiple versions of me in my head, feeling dissonance but not doubt that I was one person who just couldn’t quite figure something out. So, I don’t feel very qualified to project my trajectory much farther than I can see, but that doesn’t change my relationship with what I understand to be true today.

I may still be missing things, but I don’t believe I’m creating new ghosts to replace the old hauntings with hauntings more comfortable to my current manifestation.

It’s not your fault… but it is your responsibility

I spent these last few years listening to hundreds of videos by Tim Fletcher and others about Complex Trauma, how to understand it and how to heal from it. I would wake up, work and go to sleep with the constant cadence of “It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility” ringing through my head like it just played all through the night at high volume being piped directly into the speaker in my Guantanamo cell.

I had no idea who the audience was though at the time. It wasn’t the intended me that was pressing play and cranking the volume knob that needed to hear it. It just needed to be loud enough and repeat enough so that the parts avoiding my gaze would eventually be forced to hear it too.

And yet still nothing spoke back that I could fully recognize other than as me being the antithesis of my own intentions, the architect of my own loneliness, and the voluntary guard of my own prison cell and torture protocol. It was not my fault. I finally started to believe that part.

But it was my responsibility and I didn’t know any other way to be responsible for it other than to try to torture, smother, incarcerate and eviscerate myself in order to stop the me I couldn’t love from taking the stage.

I thought you said we were about to meet the echo child

I know. You’re right. We are, kind of. He’s not much of a talker, or a typist. He’s more of a somatic gong, rippling vibrations of terror through my nervous systems as a method of shouting terrified warnings about… well about all the things you’d expect to encounter on a normal day on modern-day Earth kind of child.

Footsteps? Yeah those are pretty terrifying. Footsteps on stairs? Really? Are you really doing this to me right now? Fast, loud, angry footsteps on stairs? This has to stop. I don’t think I can take this. What the fuck is even happening right now? Doors, cars, unexpected things falling on the ground - even if caused by my own part driven dissociated haze. As Kelly would put it, by my “body not knowing where it is in space”.

Inanimate objects had my nervous system in a constant state of overload, exhaustion and on the brink of collapse. Not just sometimes. Most of the time. I would hear a bunch of loud noises that I wasn’t expecting in a short period of time and feel the simulated post-concussive effects that my brain might force me to experience if I had just narrowly avoided a car accident due to my own loss of concentration behind the wheel for a moment. You didn’t kill us this time, but I bet this is what it would have felt like for us if you had, so you might want to PAY MORE ATTENTION NEXT TIME!

This is the life of the echo child. Or the experience of it that I have had that I recognize as resonance the echo child creates in an effort to hold onto hope for the rescue that never came when he was the one steering the hot wheels.

I had no idea there was even a basement, let alone a 6-year old version of myself locked down there, screaming in terror and banging away on the gong. I couldn’t tell him the war was over. I couldn’t tell him that we didn’t need to wait for rescue anymore because I had already rescued us and that I would never let anybody hurt him again.

So he just kept hammering and screaming out in horror for decades thinking surely this would be the noise we could no longer survive that was coming our way.

In an internal organs and external world sense, that meant constant re-injury that left me standing alone in my apartment crying for an entire weekend or experiencing physical tremors for a week straight - while having no logical conscious understanding of what in my life could possibly be making me feel that way.

It wasn’t until after the Kelly breakup, on Day 3, page 18 of my healing journey journal while listening to a video about Internal Family Systems Therapy and Parts Work on YouTube, that I finally saw the echo child.

As I was writing, I wrote on the page that I realized I was experiencing an intrusive feeling that I should feel guilty about having written 18 pages in 3 days - that it must be mania, not real self-exploration and discovery - and I decided feeling guilty about journaling about my own mental health doesn’t seem like the type of sound I should listen to, but the echo itself does.

So I tried to “listen to where the echo was coming from” and for whatever reason, I was the right combination of broken down, open, ready to give in and not ready to give up for the echo child’s echo to lead me to his frozen in time existence.

I saw the echo child. Me. 6 years old. Standing with the sort of intense lean forward that you’d have if you were trying to scream fast enough, loud enough, serious enough to make someone realize they needed to move before they were about to get struck by a car. Almost desperately reaching an impossible distance with your mind to try to physically move them out of the way. Futile, guttural screams of terror.

I don’t mean that metaphorically. That’s what I saw. I wrote in the journal, “That felt like a drug induced experience. I have no idea what just happened, but all I know was that I just said out loud, ‘holy shit that was fucking wild’ and I feel like I just stepped off an amusement park ride of something. So I feel like that must be real even though it seems impossible that it could be.”

That was not the moment I became “sure there was more than one of me”. But it was the first moment that I met one of them face to face, and in that moment I didn’t give a single fuck how crazy I looked. I told my little self that he was safe and it was going to be ok. That I loved him and that I was so sorry he was scared and alone for so long. That I was here now, and I wasn’t going to let anybody hurt him ever again.

And he listened. He listened and he stopped screaming. He’s still shaking and feeling the gong blasting reflex when the sounds occur, but not actually banging on the gong for so long and he’s beginning to trust me more and more when I tell him he’s safe with me now. That the world he was in fear of doesn’t exist anymore.

The basement is long gone. The person who caused his terror is older and we’ve made peace with them. They aren’t the same person they were when he was in the basement. That person was defeated by time and we made it out ok and are actually doing pretty damn good in a lot of ways at being an adult even.

All Grown Up Now… Right?

But the real terror wasn’t even the noise of inanimate objects. That was the background terror. The real terror was feelings. Not my own feelings. Other people’s feelings. Gross and scary. Those are the things that happen before the footsteps, stairs, doors, and voices start to get louder and turn their targeting systems in my direction. Those must be avoided at ALL costs.