The vast majority of people who have DID had childhoods full of horrific and inescapable trauma. For these children safety just didn’t exist or it was fleeting and temporary. As I have discussed previously, children have few ways of defending themselves and most of those involve trying to minimize abuse rather than preventing it.
And this brings me to the first way a perpetrator-imitating part can be trying to help. They might sound like your abuser’s voice and they might say the same phrases or threats your abuser would make but they are doing it in an attempt to create the sense of control and safety you were lacking as a child. If you can figure out what actions of yours lead to you being abused, then you can exert some control, right? You can prevent some of the abuse. This is actually a somewhat comforting thought compared to the idea that your abuser is unpredictable and the abuse is largely random and almost completely out of your control.
The sense of safety and control that the protector part who imitates your abuser may be trying to establish might be illusory. That is, it might not actually make you any safer or give you any control. But in a terrifying world where you have no safety and no control, anything that can give you a sense of both could be helpful.
This is related to a second way a perpetrator-imitating part might be attempting to help by protecting you from the unbearable realizations of your situation as a child. That is, these protector parts keep you from realizing exactly how powerless and helpless you were as a child in that situation.
What do you think about this? Are you still unconvinced? Leave a comment for me. In the next videos, I will be talking about some other motivations of these abusive-sounding protector parts and what they are trying to accomplish.