Time may be percieved differently by someone who has multiple selves. This is a description of how it is for one young woman.
For this woman, there are at least two different sorts of "now". One of them is the Now-now. She is grown up and it is 1997, her actions take place in real time, the other people around are the people she knows now. They have bodies. She can see and hear and touch them. There is also, in the Now-now, a world of things, of objects outside herself. She carries her history with her in the Now-now, but it is history.
The other "now"
is Then-now. She is a child. It is the nineteen seventies. She is several children
and has several different Then-nows, but the Then-nows are only "present"
one at a time. What happens in the Then-now is either traumatic or is about
stopping time. The people in the Then-now are people from the past. You could
say they are not really there, but they are experienced. They are not hallucinated,
but they are experienced. No-one new can get into the Then-now, it has in some
way already happened. But the self, the child, is really there, thinks and feels
as a child, feels as though she has a child's body. The child does not remember
the events of that time, she experiences them. Over and over again.
Now-now and Then-now
The first part of each word, "Now-" and "Then-" represents the latest point in time as it is being lived by the self. The "-now", the second part of both words, means present, it is what the two states share, it is the latest point in chronological time, Now-now has these two synchronised. Then-now is an experience which happened a long time ago being lived in the present.
Both Then-now and
Now-now exist within the "-now", for there is nowhere else for them
to be. There is a hard barrier of time between each Then-now and the Now-now.
Each Then-now traps a child.
Moving between the nows
A trapped child can learn to move from Then-now to Now-now. She will however, still be a child when she begins to experience Now-now, or, perhaps more accurately, when she starts to experience the Now-now again.
Moving from Then-now to Now-now is an experience like no other. The first time a child makes the transition, it is a shock. Sometimes it feels to her more like movement in space than time. One child explained a floating off, like being on a magic carpet and then being deposited unceremoniously onto the therapists couch with a bump. Another described a feeling of going through an area of fibrous grating discomfort, and then surprise at finding herself in a different and unfamiliar place. One boy appeared sudden and angry, hurled into the present.
Having reached the Now-now, each child is puzzled or surprised at where she finds herself. There are questions - Where am I? What is this place? What am I doing here? Or, to the therapist - What are you doing here? How did you get here? Who are you? - as the child experiences another person in the world she has lived in alone for so long. It becomes easier, each child gets used to the transition and begins to use the Then-now to tell the therapist her story. Some children learn to move freely between the two nows and a few can experience both nows simultaneously. Sometimes, one or more children in the Now-now and can watch and feel pity and sorrow for another child who is suffering in its own Then-now. But they cannot go there, they can only make a new contact in the Now-now.
A child who has moved
from Then-now to Now-now can begin to enjoy the world, seeing it through a child's
eyes. Each child uses the Then-now to tell enough of her story. When a child
has turned its Then-now into a Was-then (an ordinary memory), there is the possibility
of growing up.
What might have happened?
These children see themselves as having existed in a multi-dimensional spiral hidden inside the grown up person. Or sometimes that the spiral is the person. The spiral has many strands, woven together something like French knitting or perhaps like wool spun from a fleece.
The reel (!) end of the knitting would be the present moment, forever making more of the spiral, spinning it into the past. The spiral contains everything that has happened. If all had gone well, the knitting or the spun yarn would be smooth and evenly pattered.
If we look at a section of the knitting or yarn under a microscope, we might see Stern's development of the selves:
The answer to why is trauma. How is a more difficult question. Two ideas from Daniel Stern will help.
The first is the proto-narrative envelope which contains the feeling shape. This describes the structure of the spiral at an atomic level.
The second is the idea of the moment as containing within it something of what has gone just before and something in anticipation of what will immediately follow. This is sub-atomic
The first is dependent on the second. There can be no proto-narrative, and so no narrative, unless time is extended.
Time moves in one direction: from before the moment, to the moment, to the moment after the moment, and so the life is lived. The moment moves in the opposite direction, from anticipated, to actual, to historical, and so the narrative is created. Like the knitting or the spinning. The ball of wool (or the fleece) is being used up in one direction and the three dimensional spiral is being created in the other. This should all run smoothly.
But trauma intervenes. The spinning has to carry on because time will not stop, but the pattern cannot maintain itself. The moment can no longer contain the anticipation of the next, it is too terrible. So the self cannot create the proto narrative from which to build its story. One of the strands of time turns back on itself. There is nowhere else to go but round. Round and round. There is no new time to use, for the spinning must continue: stopping would be death.
A time capsule has been created. The trapped self, the trapped child, has no way out. The experience cannot become part of history, part of the narrative, it cannot become a was-then, an ordinary memory. The time capsule insulates the trapped child.
Free association can take us back into the Was-then for as far as we wish to go. Sometimes it will come across one of these time capsules containing a trapped self. The therapist will find himself in the child's space, or the child will find herself in his space, it is the same thing - and it has to happen "now".
But what a shock for a child. Suddenly there is not only a past and a present, but a future. And that makes the story possible.
The spiral has a
fourth dimension, another sort of time. This is the time in which the whole
life experience exists simultaneously, a time which exists in the unconscious.
This is the time through which the trapped child has to travel. Travelling through
this fourth dimension of time is the strange experience of moving from Then-now
to Now-now