‘A Thousand Silent Sundays’ is a memoir told in fragments. Written under pseudonyms for safety, it reflects the true story of a life marked by lifelong sexual abuse, dissociation, and survival.

I grew up in a family where silence, obedience, terror and confusion went hand in hand. Abuse, abandonment, and neglect were not singular events with a single individual. They began before birth and threaded through childhood, adolescence, marriage, and well into mid-life. This is a story of sexual, physical, psychological, and religious abuse that resulted in nearly a thousand rapes by the same man.

For four decades, silence was the price of survival. Speaking was not safe. That external silence became internal silence… dissociation. My mind escaped torment by shutting down and fragmenting. As a result, my personality never integrated in the usual way. I live with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Different parts of me carry different memories, voices, and truths. Some are children, some are adults, each holding a piece of the story.

This blog is not linear, because life in a system is not linear. You will not find a polished narrative here. What you will find is a mosaic of experience that offers a sense of what living with DID is like. Posts are written by different parts, with different voices. They may overlap, contradict, or co-author. One may hold the timeline of an event, another its trauma, another its meaning, while the body holds the pain and others stay in denial. That is how memory works when divided for survival.

What you will find here:

• Reflections on life with DID
• What we wish mental health professionals and the public understood about DID
• Memories of abuse (not explicit) and their aftermath
• Writing from different parts, each with their own voice
• Thoughts on recovery, therapy, and the long work of ending abuse and healing from decades of sexual trauma

What you won’t find here:

• Explicit descriptions of CSA or sexual assault. There is no need.
• A neat “we were born, we lived, we healed, here’s the lesson” narrative.
• Politeness about the impact of lifelong sexual abuse. It may get sweary.

As I write this (October 2025), the abuse has not ended. I hope one day to update this page and say, finally: It’s over. For now, my abuser still haunts my steps. This blog is my footsteps, the only legacy I have. To say ‘this happened, this is my truth’ and to create a record that relieves the weight of unbearable silence that those who have survived the unimaginable, carry daily.

Thank you for choosing to bear witness to us and our story.