We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lyn Barrett. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lyn below.

Hi Lyn, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

After 20 years of decompensation and recovery from dissociative identity disorder (DID), and 20 years of living as an integrated happy person, I decided to write and publish my memoir called Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory in 2022. At the time of publication, I was 74 years old, retired from a career as teacher, school principal, and pastor, and living with my third husband of 5 years (husband #1 was divorced, and husband #2 sadly died). I had raised four wonderful children who, nonetheless, had suffered from my instability and dissociation and their father’s issues as well. Over the years, we had repaired our relationships and were comfortably close.

Publishing my memoir was a huge risk. At this late stage of life, the memoir was my act of “coming out.” Professionally, telling people I had DID would have been disastrous. Personally, it would have sabotaged my efforts at being “normal.” Only now, with retirement under my belt, could I be honest about my diagnosis and the experience of living a chaotic, triggered life.

On the one hand, being authentic about who I was and how I got there was freeing. On the other hand, it was frightening. I worried how my children would take it and thought about withholding the information from them. My therapist and two friends who were therapists encouraged me to tell them about my history and my memoir, which in retrospect was the right decision. However, one of my children didn’t respond well and we are now further apart than we’ve ever been, which is heartbreaking for me. Still, I don’t regret taking this risk. The truth is the truth and it is hard work helping a family heal from lies.

A benefit beyond family healing has been the powerful networking that’s emerged since the memoir’s publication. To create a platform for my book, I began a small virtual writers workshop for people with dissociative disorders. This group has grown and reshaped itself into a nonprofit reaching people internationally called Dissociative Writers that offers three different kinds of writing workshops, three times a week, with four different facilitators, an annual published anthology, a weekly blog and newsletter, a committed board, and a community platform called Heartbeat. Dissociative Writers has taken on a life of its own under my leadership, but also with the growth of new leaders from our ranks. The healing that has come from sharing stories through writing, witnessing to the stories, and learning how to claim our voices has been inspirational.

Lyn, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

* Retired teacher, school principal, and pastor
* Author of memoir, Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory (www.lynbarrett.com)
* Founder of Dissociative Writers (www.dissociativewriters.com), now a nonprofit in the state of NM
* DW is open to anyone with a dissociative diagnosis or who relates to a dissociative diagnosis and who feels called to express themselves through writing.
* DW mission: to provide a safe space for people with dissociative disorders to support one another in our writing and encourage the creativity that helped us survive to tell our stories.
* We offer Draft & Discuss workshops (writers volunteer in advance to submit writing for others to give support and feedback), Writing-in-Place (writers come without pre-written writing and write in the workshop in response to a prompt) and Focused Writing (writers bring their own projects to work on for about two hours with occasional check-ins with each other).
* All forms of writing are welcome with the exception of horror and erotica.
* We offer one Memoir 101 class each year; a 6-week curriculum-based course with readings, content, discussion, experiential learning, and writing feedback.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

People with DID experience incredible pain as traumatic memories begin to surface and alternate parts of ourselves make themselves know. Early in my teaching career as my life began to fall apart, I attempted suicide since every other strategy I tried to employ to end the chaos in my mind was unsuccessful. Fortunately, my suicide attempt was unsuccessful too.

In the same year as my suicide attempt, I was offered the position as Head of a Quaker School which shows a wide breadth of discontinuity! People with DID have the capacity to manage the most difficult feelings while also accomplishing the most amazing achievements. This is because we have different alters, or parts of our brains, take over different roles. My suicidal alter was powerful, but my alters who achieved in the classroom and as a leader were more powerful.

Eventually, healing and integration requires all alters to come to know one another, to share information, and to collaborate. Still, we are left with the ability to manage huge highs and lows that other people might find daunting.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

When I was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder in 1992 (now called dissociative identity disorder), there were few resources available to people with the diagnosis. Fortunately, I had a wonderful therapist who was experienced with treating dissociative disorders. Yet research was just beginning, the internet was just opening up, and misinformation abounded.

Today, there are many resources available to people with this or similar diagnosis: An Infinite Mind, Multiplied by One, Reversing Adversity, SystemSpeak, Facebook groups, and more. Research abounds with many outstanding writers like Bessel vander Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, and Janina Fisher, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. I’m proud to say that Dissociative Writers now takes its place among the resources.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lynbarrett.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com
• Other: https://www.dissociativewriters.com