Why didn’t I feel that I belonged to my parents? How early could I have known that I was not right? I think it has always been part of me. Can a newborn sense her parents’ disappointment and feelings of frustration at not being able to change the unchangeable?

When I was with my mother, I sometimes thought of myself of a trophy – something to be flaunted before friends. When out of public view, I sat on the shelf ignored and forgotten.

I was just thinking that I started off OK,” Jo said. “There wasn’t anything different or wrong with me when I was born. I wasn’t inherently bad or freakish.

More than one personality was created in the hope of being the daughter Nancy could consistently love. More than one new personality was created in response to Mother’s unexpected fury.

I had never before considered that people near me might have problems that were not caused by me. I had been created to please people. If the people around me weren’t happy, I must be doing something wrong. Lynn helped me see that I lacked the power to make other people feel anything.

It’s as though I’m sitting in the audience caught up in a well-made film.

It’s like I’m carrying around this huge secret that I’m never supposed to tell. But since I don’t remember just what I’m supposed to keep secret, I’m afraid I’ll tell it by mistake.

No one inside will ever disappear. We're all real. We all matter.

Only two and a half years before, I had felt threatened by internal "compulsions" that had no name; now I knew I was multiple. Once I had wanted to destroy the other personalities; now I wanted everyone to be happy.

Gordon and Lynn recognized within the Flock a sense of internal coordination that none of the individual personalities could see.