Altered Life

Two women lived an altered life together.One was trafficked from birth. To survive, her mind did what a child's mind can do when there is no other way out: it divided, into many. The other went in after her, stayed beside her under the same danger, and did not leave until they were both out.Altered Life is their testimony, told together. Part One belongs to the people who live inside one system - speaking in their own words, on their own terms, each one named and met as a person rather than a symptom. Part Two belongs to the companion who stayed long enough to meet every single one of them, and who held an entire life's memory for someone who could not hold it herself.This is not only a survivor's account. It is also a method for reading one. The both/and - the principle that the light and the dark can be true at the same time - runs through the whole book, and in its final section becomes something larger: a way of weighing evidence about things that were done in the dark and then deliberately buried. What the destroyed records cannot prove, convergence can.Included for researchers and clinicians: a claims register, a documented account of a spoken-only language recorded years before this book existed, and a plain statement of what is corroborated, what is not, and how to tell the difference.Nothing in here was written to be about the two women who lived it.For every child still waiting under a bush, in a box, in the dark - this book exists so it stops happening to more of you.