Shortcut: 2,500 Ways to Survive

**Meshel Laurie** (0:00)
The following podcast contains accounts of child sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. In 2019, Dr. Jeni Haynes gave evidence in court against her father, who was charged with various sex crimes committed against Jeni throughout her childhood. In the history-making trial, Dr. Jeni was the first person in the world allowed to present evidence on the stand from several of her personalities. Dr. Jeni lives with a condition known as dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder. She has over 2,000 personalities whom she refers to as alters. She's the subject of a new documentary streaming on SBS called We Are Jeni, and she joins us to talk about life as she lives it today. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
When you popped up on the screen, who's waiting to come into the call, it was Symphony.

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (1:09)
That's right, yes.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:11)
Is that your most common alter or is that-

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (1:14)
Yeah. She's the one that created all of us.
It's us honoring the little girl that made everybody else. For the lived experience of having DID, my experience is we have a doorway, and whoever is sitting in the doorway is in the body. Nice and simple. It's a doorway, you just sit down and there you go. However, when somebody wants to come along, you just get moved ever so slightly sideways, and then they sit down and then they're in the body. If two of us are in the body at the same time, we have what is known as co-consciousness. Wow. So you can actually have a outside conversation with say you, and at the same time we're having an inside conversation with whoever's just sat down with us. When you look at the diagnosis of MPD, MPD is considered a mental illness.
We are dysfunctional apparently, but we're not. We are small children surviving the worst the world has to offer in the only way we can. I mean, most of the trauma that results in MPD or DID occurs when we are pre-verbal. So we don't know that we're making alter personalities. We just have a need and someone rocks up to fill that need. And it just so happens you've created an alter personality 2682 times.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:59)
And your doctor, Dr. George Blair-West, he says that part of it too, part of the evolution of MPD, DID is a very young child feeling like no one is coming to help them, that most obviously the two people they should, they expect should take care of them. Their two parents have made it clear to them that they're not going to come and rescue them. And in fact, they're inflicting the trauma. In your case, your dad was inflicting the trauma. And so you needed to invent people to rescue you.

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (3:34)
Yes, we make people to rescue us. Yes, but what I did, hi, I'm Symphony.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:43)
Oh, hello.

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (3:45)
This is my question. So I understood that I had to help daddy.
And we're not gonna talk about anything, any details, we're just gonna talk around it so that I don't traumatize anybody. And if we get tricky, Boris will come and give everybody a trigger warning. If you hear a Russian voice, it's Boris.
So I made people to do the jobs that made it hard for me to deal with daddy. So daddy smells. So I made people that could not smell daddy.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:27)
So is that what you mean, Symphony, by saying that you had to help daddy?

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (4:31)
Okay. We'll need trigger warning. When we talk of helping daddy, when she's talking about being abused, he pitched it as only she could help him. But it turns out that what it was was rape and childhood sexual abuse and very unpleasant. So we try to use euphemisms.
So what he told her was that she had to help him.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:58)
So that's his word, his terminology. Okay, I see.

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (5:01)
Okay, I think that's N. Prigga warning.

**Meshel Laurie** (5:04)
Thank you.

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (5:08)
In many ways, I guess I'm the one that he harmed, I think is the current time for it. I'm the one that he harmed every day for 14 years.
My alters are people that came and did everything else. They went to school, they read books, they played, they did the things that I didn't have that time or energy to do.