She Was Always Danielle
The Part Who Kept Me Alive by Disappearing
Hi, Hello, Friends! 🤓
***If you’re new here, I have CPTSD and I am working hard to integrate deep healing into my life. I see two therapists weekly and one intermittently. Between them we work with three main modalities: EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and somatic work. If none of those words mean anything to you yet, that’s okay. Most of the time they still feel strange and quite literally crazy making in moments to me too, and I’m the one living inside this in real time.
I say this with a request of empathy and kindness if you are here reading my words. When you come here and read my words, you’re reading the most unfiltered version of me that exists outside my own mind. Parts of me I kept hidden for almost 38 years. I’m not writing from a place of having figured anything out. I’m writing from the middle of it. I’m writing at MY in-between, my liminal space. It is a precious protected space and time for me.
That said, I want to pause and explain a few concepts before we go further, because some of the words I’m about to use actually have a lot of weight to them. I tend to drop these massive concepts and trauma words and speak of them as if it is just another Tuesday, because for me it is. This is my life and my mind, every single day.
So, Words like Complex PTSD, parts. Dissociation. Splitting. Even for me, those words stirred up a lot of uncomfortable feelings before I understood what they actually meant.
So let me try to explain them the way I wish someone had explained them to me decades ago.
First, IFS, or Internal Family Systems.
The premise is actually not that scary as I first felt. The foundation of IFS is simply multiplicity is the natural, healthy state of every human mind. Everyone has parts. The anxious part. The people-pleasing part. The one that shuts down when things get too hard.
Trauma doesn’t break a unified self into pieces. What it does is burden parts that would have developed normally and force some of them into extreme protective roles they were never meant to hold forever.
And dissociation that word that sounds so clinical and frightening is just what happens when a part of you decides that leaving the body is safer than staying in it.
It is not the same as DID, which is what most people picture when they hear words like splitting or parts or dissociation. DID involves distinct alternate identities with their own sense of self, memory, and sometimes even different names and ages. What I’m describing is something most trauma survivors experience on a spectrum a nervous system that learned to protect itself by compartmentalizing. By sending certain parts of the experience somewhere else.
You don’t have to have DID for dissociation to be real.
You don’t have to have multiple personalities for parts work to apply to you.
If you’ve ever felt like part of you wanted something and another part of you was terrified of it you already know what I’m talking about.
And whatever the mental health concern is, yours, mine, anyone’s, I think it is well past time we talk about these things without shame. Without villainizing the people who carry them. Without making someone feel like they have to hide for almost 38 years before they can finally say it out loud.
Okay. Now let’s get into it.
I was recently laying in bed journaling after EMDR therapy.
This has become a bit of a pattern for me lately. Therapy opens something, and then later my brain starts pulling and following the threads.
So, I grabbed my journal and started mapping out the parts I’ve had been talking about in therapy.
The first one we found in EMDR was the part I call Red.
Red is very little. Probably somewhere around zero to four. She doesn’t really speak. She doesn’t feel verbal at all, actually. She feels like body alarms.
Temperature changes. Something shifting in the room. Knowing something is wrong before there are words for what wrong even means.
Red is basically the part of me that learned danger through the body before language existed.
Red is the sweet little exiled part. When I think of her, she feels deeply protected in the deepest most inner parts of me.
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my family has told me, my entire life, that most people outside our immediate home thought I was nonverbal.
Quiet. Timid. Barely there.
The outside world saw a little girl who didn’t speak.
And now I know why.
Red didn’t have words. She wasn’t withholding them. She just hadn’t built them yet, because in the environment she was formed in, she wasn’t safe.
She learned the room through her body instead.
And apparently, everyone could see it. They just didn’t know what they were looking at.
Then in another session, we identified Critical Lauren.
She showed up later, probably around nine to twelve.
Critical Lauren mirrors my mom’s voice and appearance during that time. She predicts problems before they happen. She points out what is wrong before anyone else can see it. She wants the solution immediately, yesterday, why didn’t you solve this sooner.
I can clearly identify this now as a Classic manager part.
She needs a lot of compassion, she is trying to give safety by being perfect.
When I was laying there looking at the ages of those two parts, something suddenly hit me.
Red: 0–4
Critical Lauren: 9–12
And my brain went…
Wait.
What happened between four and nine?
That suddenly felt really loud.
I IN FACT said it out loud, my brain went somewhere I didn’t send it. Automatic. Like something inside had been waiting for THAT question.
So I started following the trail in my journal.
And as soon as I started thinking about those years, something familiar in my body started happening.
Fog.
Memory gaps.
That floaty feeling where things start getting distant.
My ears ringing.
My skin getting prickly.
And that’s when something clicked for me.
If I hadn’t been learning about dissociation, I probably would have missed what was happening.
But because I had been reading about it and talking about it in therapy, I recognized the pattern.
That wasn’t nothing.
That was another part.
A part whose entire job was getting me out of my body.
I want to be honest about something before I go further.
Journaling through these moments, even alone, is not some peaceful reflection. It is not always an experience of rainbows and butterflies.
Going into the spaces in my brain that hold the deepest trauma is danger for my body and my brain. My nervous system doesn’t know the difference between remembering and reliving.
I took a break from mapping and started a stream of consciousness. I’m keeping that private. But I don’t want to skip past what it actually looked like, because I think that matters. This is what the in-between liminal space actually requires. Not just sitting with discomfort. Intentional staying in the most difficult moments. And continuing to move.
There were tears. I threw up. I used one of my somatic methods and shook my hands out to move the energy somewhere. I was sweating. There was a moment where I could distinctly feel a part of me that was genuinely afraid I wouldn’t move through it.
Because I haven’t always. I have gone into these places before and collapsed.
But something was different this time.
The parts both wanted to let the truth out and actively fought to keep it hidden. At the same time. That internal conflict, that is how powerful our minds and bodies truly are. Protective parts are trying to keep you safe even when the truth is trying to get free.
I stayed.
Staying felt most important this time.
I felt important enough to stay. I AM important enough to stay.
And because I stayed, things started connecting. I started connecting.
The nosebleeds. The bedwetting. The wetting accidents while awake. The meltdowns. The collapsing fear of the dark even now, at 37. The ringing ears. The static. Feeling trapped.
Things that never made sense to me separately growing up.
But it’s more than that. I never thought to go deeper. Everything always looped back to the same place: I’m defective.
So I never approached what was happening to me as a response to abuse.
In fact, in all of my digital writing over the last several decades, I never typed the word abuse until 2014. I was born in 1988. I had been experiencing abuse my entire life. But I didn’t type that word until 2014..
None of me is defective.
My body was trying to survive something it couldn’t escape.
And I want to say this plainly, because it needs to be said:
The pain those parts carry will never not be too much.
Because it never should have happened to me.
After I journaled for a while, I realized I felt this part needed a name.
So I named her Dissociation Danielle.
The name wasn’t random.
But I’ll come back to that.
I think this part might be the one who needs me the most right now.
Not because she necessarily feels the most wounded.
But because she feels the most… lost.
I don’t feel connected to her.
She doesn’t really have a clear story in my mind.
She has fog. She has missing years. She has body reactions and survival strategies. She has static.
She is the part who kept me alive by disappearing.
And until recently, she didn’t even have a name.
Red is the most wounded part of me.
She is the one who carries the earliest alarm. The body memory. The knowing that something was wrong before I had language for wrong.
But as I sat there looking at the whole system, something else felt true too.
Red may be the most wounded… but she might not be the part who needs me the most right now.
I don’t know if that makes sense.
The part that keeps pulling at my attention is Danielle.
The firefighter.
The dissociation part.
And the reason feels hard to explain.
Red has a shape. She has a body alarm. She has a kind of presence.
Critical Lauren has a voice.
But Danielle…
Danielle feels like absence. Like, static. Like a void of space.
Like fog.
Like the years where my memories just… drop off.
Sometimes she feels like she isn’t fully real. Like she didn’t fully exist. Even visually, I don’t have an image of me during that time.
And the more I sit with that feeling, the more I realize something uncomfortable about dissociation.
When a child has to leave their body over and over to survive something, the years they spend doing that don’t fully integrate into a sense of self.
Those years don’t become a clear story.
They become gaps. Fog. Missing pieces.
Danielle doesn’t have a loud wound the way Red does.
Danielle is the response to the wound.
Her entire job was disappearing.
Not dramatic. Not loud. Just… not quite there.
And absence is actually one of the hardest things to grieve.
Because it doesn’t announce itself.
It’s just something that should be there… and isn’t.
I’m also not sure Danielle needs healing the way we usually think about healing.
I feel She might need something much simpler.
To be witnessed.
To be told she existed.
To be found.
To be told that the years she covered were real, even if I can’t remember them clearly.
That the job she did, however it looked, whatever it cost, kept me alive.
She took me out of my body so I could survive what was happening to it.
She did that as a child.
Alone.
Without anyone naming what she was doing.
Without anyone thanking her for it.
She existed for decades without even having a name.
Until March 12, 2026.
That’s a long time to go unnamed.
After I mapped all of this out, I texted my therapist Kim.
I told her I thought my firefighter needed me most.
Except that’s not what I typed.
I typed needs me most.
I meant to write needs healing most. I went back thirty minutes later and caught it.
And I sat there staring at those three words.
Needs me most.
My response was immediate and out loud.
“That was not an accident. That was the Dissociative Danielle part telling you she needs you.”
I got chillbumps reading it.
Not healing. Not fixing. Not processing.
Me.
Danielle doesn’t need a treatment plan.
She needs to be found by the person she kept alive.
And the name I gave her wasn’t an accident either.
During that same stretch of missing years, one memory I have that feels connected is this moment where I kept forgetting how to spell my middle name.
Danielle.
No one used it. Which is probably part of why I loved it so much. It felt like it was only mine.
I had a Precious Moments plaque my grandma made me with my full name on it. I wasn’t really allowed to touch it. I would get in trouble if I did, even though it was on my wall. Because, I might break it.
So I would sneak it down and practice the spelling, over and over.
Trying to remember it.
Trying to hold onto it.
At the time it just seemed like a weird childhood memory.
But now it feels like something else entirely.
Like a little girl trying to hold onto herself during a period where so much of her was slipping away.
And years later, when I finally noticed the part who had been quietly covering those lost years…
The name that surfaced was Danielle.
The same name that little girl was trying so hard to remember.
That’s not a coincidence.
Maybe some part of me held onto that memory so I could find her again later.
And I did.
I am not my past.
I am the story.
I choose to keep writing.
💌 Thank you for meeting me here, friends!
A la Luna, 🌙
Lauren 🪻🍀
I have been working on a creative little project over at [freckledlore.com]
She is a work-in-progress just like I am. I hope to meet you there. 🤓