The concept of “Lil MaryBeth” was the brainchild of my second husband, Bob; who often encouraged me to be kind to my lil self. I manifested it as a nurturing, feeding, and empowering relationship with my younger selves.
--Izzy, (2024)
The reality; it would take years to understand my illness and to facilitate the integration of my multiple personalities and the nurturing of Lil MaryBeth.
To 12 year-old MaryBeth. Physician Heal Thyself (Corresponding With My BPD Entrenched Preteen Self)
by
Elizabeth Wilson; Counselor, Manager, Educator, and Author (the integrated me!).
Salutations to my 12 year old self;
Firstly, you are safe and can trust me. I will not minimize your traumas (aka truths), I will believe you, I will help you see that the landscape of your psyche was NOT irreversibly painted red and black. We do recover.
So, Lil Izzy, I see you. I hear you and your best friend talking about sex, drinking, and drugs. I saw you, when none of those sufficed, take the exacto knife to your skin. I feel terror now, but for you I know it is relief; our minds attend to the most urgent need. When we cut or burn, our
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Letter to My 12 Year Old Self from All My Dissociative Selves
mind and body shift from mental anguish to our—more urgent—physical pain. No judgement! However, I have seen your shame about it and I want you to know that a few decades of hard emotional work and self-analysis will bring adaptive coping to replace the self harm.
Now I am going to bring up some sensitive trauma details; if you feel uncomfortable, triggered, or want to take a break then just put this letter down and count or hike to relieve your anxiety.
You know me, intuitively, as future self. I am a 55 year old writer and social worker. I have two children and three grandchildren and a vast array of best friends. I have had over 100 jobs since I started working at age 13 (Yep, next year you’ll cut your teeth volunteering to be a candy striper). I’ve had a long string of amazing people who cauterized out traumas with their unconditional love.
Professionally, I have a MSW and a BA in Psychology and Women’s Studies and I have done empirical studies and case studies as well. I am solution-oriented and my motivations are most strongly influenced by love and human rights advocacy. I’m an excellent therapist who revels in always learning new things. I assure you that I am qualified to make the assumptions and connections that will follow.
Lil Izzy; this letter is your escape from your heartache, your handbook to recovery and your hope for the future.
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Letter to My 12 Year Old Self from All My Dissociative Selves
Let’s tackle understanding what you have been through and how it has germinated, synthesized, and influenced your “bad” coping mechanism of self harm (in the forms of cutting, burning, and picking at your skin). You won’t have to go to institutions if you follow this letter’s advice.
Probably the most poignant effect of the incest, rape, and physical abuse that you've gone through to date is the loss of control over your body via these intrusions. Your body in your mind right now is your enemy and your weapon. You can use it to get the things you want or it can be the reason for another assault or trauma. This has devastated your self- efficacy and brings us to the second most heinous reason for your current self-harm.
You have had a dichotomous paradigm shift that lends itself to “should thinking,” “ black and white thinking,” and a cognitive narrative hosted by your abusers words to you. Therefore we need to change the narrative in your head from a critical, harsh judging of little MaryBeth to a nurturing dialogue.
Use your resources, try and prove me wrong, and--@ the end of the day-- learn other ways to cope with your traumas like exercise, writing, reading, socializing, etc. Research Dialectical Behavior Therapy and practice self control, rewire your brain, and thrive Lil MaryBeth. The alternative is a lifetime of self harm that expands to drug dependence and repeated trauma played out over and over again. I’ll be right here routing for you!
To Lil MaryBeth from Lil MaryBeth Wilson
When Self Control Is Out of Reach: Apologetics of Chronic Trauma.
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Letter to My 12 Year Old Self from All My Dissociative Selves
Hey older me! This is a trippy assignment, with monsters hiding everywhere in plain site, it’s hard to say more than trust no one, but I’ll give it a shot. Apparently you’re still self harming at 12. I can’t remember when I started it, but it’s been years now.
After our first memory being our dad searching for the whole family…mom, bubby and me…with a liquor bottle and handgun calling out our names while mom covered our four-year old mouth to prevent him finding us. You may not remember it, likely blocked out the pain. But it will resurface when you fall in love. The truths that noone can really be trusted not to hurt you, truths of a trail of blood that allows you to disassociate and go to our fantasy head space.
While you’re having grand adventures through books or your own writing and art I will be diligently watching for betrayal and abandonment from everyone. I will set you up to biochemically become conscious of the evil, the danger, the coldness of the world.
Elizabeth and Izzy say that we soften in time, that the rage that fuels me to protect you can be replaced with peace. I’m highly skeptical. Hmph.
Still, even at 12 and 55, I plan to be on guard, looking out for you. We have nothing but ourselves and if someone doesn’t agree with my borderline tantrums, negative outlook, and total fear of abandonment they cannot be trusted.
I see you carrying the knives and while u may use them to hurt yourself, I say you let me use them on the next perpetrator!
Lil you.
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Letter to My 12 Year Old Self from All My Dissociative Selves
To 12 yo MaryBeth from Bethany.
What Happens When You Cannot Run Anymore?
In a few months you will tie sheets to your canopy bed and climb out the window. It will be your first time running away and the synthesis will be one of your brother’s friends, who you will marry after an agreement with Mom to come home and go back to high school.
You will go with him to Lexington first, then to the Eastern Kentucky coal mining mountains. You will believe you can save him. He will physically and psychologically terrorize you. You will become small and frightened all the time. You will come to your senses in less than a year, but forever have become a woman. Your innocence will evaporate and be traded for a jaded, hopeless outlook. You will run to drugs and alcohol and every shiney bauble that promises an adventure will be undertaken.
When you meet a man you can trust, you will destroy him with your insecurities and impulsivity then trade him for someone cruel.
From now to age 43 you will be running away, sabotaging, and being a victim (and a perpetrator on some levels as well) unless something intervenes.
I can’t side with Elizabeth’s “change the internal dialogue, change outcomes” paradigm. They hurt us and hurt us and hurt us and I want to decimate them and the parts of myself that ran, hid, or did not fight in some way. Hopefully, at 12, reading this letter; I am not as at home with bad
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Letter to My 12 Year Old Self from All My Dissociative Selves
touch flashbacks, cutting off pieces of my arm with clippers, acting out at school, and essentially-trying to hide.
Stop running now preteen me and face the demons in any way available: research and know yourself so completely you could fill volumes with empirical evidence that life is not one horror after another and an indisputable case study that we will survive because it is actually one miracle after another.
I think about our mom and all she has already done to try and compete with our perpetrators voices and tell us how blessed, magical, and important we are. Appreciate her MaryBeth, Elizabeth said she died at 59.
12 year old me, I’ll protect u. I’m ready in a moment to stop or even hurt the people who hurt us. Bubby taught me how to use a knife last year. I’m on guard and hyper vigilance will ensure I keep you safe while you fix us, empower us, and educate us. Pull up your pretty pink panties, I’m already a hard core warrior and that means you are too! Good luck, I love you and I believe in you…and I believe in us!
By Izzy to Lil MaryBeth
Becoming Whole
Dear sweet, smart, adorable MaryBeth;
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Letter to My 12 Year Old Self from All My Dissociative Selves
I am writing as your 55 year old self. You’re going to have battles ahead; you’ll face epidemics, pandemics, the rape and abuse you have already faced, more mental health labels than there are soupcans and few, but significant physical challenges.
You get the education we suggested to you in this correspondence. In fact you will graduate magna cum laude, with Honors, with a six year old and newborn and husband in tow.
You will constantly be reinventing yourself, widening your worldviews and fighting for the marginalized. All the BS they did to us and the ways we coped to survive will fall off like scales from our eyes, giving you a beautiful view of life . You’ll return to the familiar in spirituality.
You wrote and illustrated your first book at age 4. Could read at 2 ½. Had people tell u repeatedly that you were a creative force and an analytical empiricist. You helped people. You molded young minds and created and supported human rights activists.
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Letter to My 12 Year Old Self from All My Dissociative Selves