Ellie knows trauma

I don't know what the gold ball means. I just know these are both Ellie. No specific meaning goes with them.

This represents traumatic silencing to me.


I'm not sure I want to know what Ellie is remembering in this collage.


I did not know what the head gear represented initially. It is a stereotactic instrument that keeps the skull still during brain surgery. Wtf?



Ellie beginning to heal. Aside from appearing bald, she nearly always appeared naked. This ad shows her with hair...a sign of beginning to heal. Amazingly, the small print speaks of the journey of turtles. Turtles have gone with her since some of her first images. Perhaps why I now own a turtle and honor them?


This selection of collages and images are but a few of the strange and disturbing trauma remembered by Ellie. This last collage originally had a blank right bottom corner. I added the photo of her healed and looking confident...and clothed. The top images still upset me.

In my integration earlier this week, Ellie reunited with Jane who will be featured in the next post. Janie grew up to be Jane. Ellie has always appeared as an adult even though she was likely created by the time I was 3.

Hard Candy

Starting off slowly to show how my system introduced me to themselves. Understand I had a room with piles of pictures torn out from magazines. Most adult alters came from fashion magazines. In every case, after digging through piles of pictures, eventually I would see a pattern or "recognize" someone I'd seen in a previous picture and go scavaging. Is this the same model? I have no idea. But there is no doubt the pictures belong with this one alter.

Notice the words "hair candy" and "hard candy" on the first two ads. It's hard to believe there would be two ads with someone with that facial expression in the world. Also, I have no pictures of a full body...just her head. Names of alters were given to me. I didn't make them up. Names weren't always reflected on the images but often were. This is Hard Candy. You can see the trauma in the first two pictures and the serenity of having healed in the third picture.