VICTIM DISCUSSES ILLNESS, RECALLS YEARS OF ABUSE

She looks like the all-American girl -- beautiful blonde hair, bright blue eyes and a smile that lights the room.

But behind the facade is a confused little girl, a seductress and an intellectual. They have different names, personalities and characteristics.

They belong to Sherry, a 24-year-old Cape Girardeau resident diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, the newest name for multiple personality disorder.

Perhaps the new name is more appropriate, as the illness begins with typical daydreaming, or dissociating, and ends up with completely different personalities handling stress for the victim.

Psychotherapy professionals estimate that 97 percent of people with DID are victims of severe child abuse. By severe, they mean instances of abuse unfathomable by typical families.

Sherry's abusers began shaking and hitting her when she was 2 weeks old, then progressed to sticking objects in her vagina when she was 6 months old.

Sherry's mother told her later in life about some of the incidents. But as she aged, she remembered, and her life became a nightmare.

"My stepfather did it the longest -- almost every day," Sherry said. "Once he didn't do it on Christmas, and I just looked at the lights on the tree, and I couldn't understand what was wrong."

When she was 4, a friend of the family volunteered to "watch" Sherry. He gave her I.V. drugs, watched the reaction, then raped her.

When she was 6, her parents left on a trip and she was left locked outside the house, sleeping with the family dog and eating persimmons.

When she was 8, her family and some of their friends gave her vodka and made her smoke pot, then shoved her into an animal cage and started poking sticks at her.

It went on for years, while her family functioned in the community with no one suspecting the situation. Finally, when Sherry was 13, someone noticed their behavior and she briefly was in a foster home.

But Sherry was a straight-A student obsessed with psychology. She read the books and knew what to say to keep her family from being investigated further. If she failed, they told her, she would be killed. The lies worked, and the case worker returned her to her family.

No charges have ever been brought against the people who abused Sherry, and she remains reluctant to pursue the matter.

Society failed Sherry -- there wasn't any more disturbance from social agencies for the rest of her stay at home, even though she confided in a teacher and in her mother. By age 17, she already had developed most of her personalities and left home to be in more abusive relationships.

She tried the police academy, cosmetology school, mechanical engineering classes, nursing school -- dropping out of all of them after a few months. She was a security guard, managed a jewelry store, but couldn't keep a job.

The problem was her other personalities. She blacked out for hours or days and turned up in different towns, or depression drove her to stay in bed for weeks at a time, only getting up to use the bathroom.

She finally made a friend in Teri Wondra, who drives her to appointments when a childish personality emerges and Sherry can't drive. Over the years, Wondra has grown used to her friend's behavior.

"Sometimes I don't know who it is I'm meeting," Wondra said. "Maybe I haven't been around her when the personality has emerged before, but sometimes I know because of her hairstyle or the way she speaks."

When she was 19, Sherry began therapy for everything from manic-depression to alcoholism to bulimia. It was just this year a Cape Girardeau psychologist diagnosed her real problem. Now Sherry goes to a counselor in Cape Girardeau and a psychologist in St. Louis, and things are getting better.

In her 10 years in practice, Beverly Stott, Sherry's Cape Girardeau counselor, hasn't treated anyone else with multiple personalities, but there are basic therapies for anyone who has a dissociative disorder, she said.

"Multiples dissociate during abuse," she said. "But in the cases of DID, they don't come back to where they were originally. They develop another personality who copes. It's a very, very difficult thing to understand."

And understanding isn't encouraged by the way Hollywood portrays multiples -- maniacs whose personalities speak out loud to each other in public, murderers who kill under one personality and reassume another. This is untrue in the vast majority of cases, as most multiples turn violence on themselves.

Stott is working to help Sherry trust people again. The client must learn the difference between the real and unreal and discover her likes and dislikes.

Dr. Harry Bradley, the St. Louis psychologist, is helping Sherry through Eye Movement Desensitization/Reprocessing therapy. Basically, Sherry must remember bad childhood experiences and what she felt while they happened. Then she must replace the bad feelings with positive reinforcement -- instead of blaming herself for molestation, she should remember that she was a helpless child.

While doing all this, Bradley uses a small light to direct her eyes this way and that, stimulating the synapses in her brain to process information.

He said the process should lead Sherry to resolution, ending her need for dissociation and improving day-to-day life.

And Sherry has some big plans, too. She wants to return to school, this time studying her true love, psychology, and to be a strong, whole person.