Scattered pieces

How do you take back a holiday from the nightmares and flashbacks? The last three nights have been filled with nightmares and surreal dreams.

We are not consciously aware of any anniversary around Christmas, but have always dreaded the holidays. The father was a functional alcoholic and he tended to be at home more over the Summer holidays as where he worked was seasonally geared towards Winter sports – he managed a sports club/bar. This was also the time when we used to have to go to work with him on a regular basis as it was school holidays and there was no child care facilities (except for the older brothers and sister).

Alcohol was always a factor in the childhood. Whether it was being forced to drink the gathered dregs of all the alcohol left over from the night before when we were cleaning the clubrooms from the age of 4; or clearing the ladies toilets at the end of the night to check for those that were unconscious in the early teens. The family life revolved around alcohol and sport. It is from these experiences that Scruff was born… Scruff is our tough tom boy who could take the knocks, laughs and taunts that came from being one of the few females under the age of 7 who was constantly at the male dominated clubrooms. She could take it and keep on smiling.

Not sure why Scruff is making her presence felt at the moment. We did a private clip for YouTube which described our internal house, and it was the first time that she allowed a picture to represent herself to the outside world. If there is an anniversary coming that is tied to her, it would seem out of place, as she was mainly present when things were really raucous in the clubrooms over the winter months. She used to be rewarded with bags of chips.

Sometimes a memory will come through that just shakes you to the core… how could a person do those things to that smiling little girl???

As a librarian, we are used to researching and finding the answers to our questions.  As a person with a dissociative disorder, the need for reliable information is high, but the quality of the information available is mixed.  It is easy to search for one aspect of dissociation and get a range of resources that run the spectrum from ridiculous and insulting, through to peer reviewed, balanced debates or research.

We have another blog called Scattered Pieces about the struggles, challenges and joy that the dissociation can cause.   So this blog will not concentrate on that aspect of our life, but more the questions that result from those experiences.  This will solely be our opinion on the pieces found.  We’ve been librarians for 10 years now, so know about evaluating information.  But we also have the disorder, so have a bias as to what fits for us and how it influences our world view.  As with any information you find on the Internet, you should question its validity and the motivations for publishing it in a public forum.

Today we thought we’d go do some shopping… just pick-up some silly things to send to friends and some groceries… nothing big or exciting.

One of the big problems with going shopping is that the ex-husband was a security guard. This meant that he worked at one time or another in most of the larger shopping malls in the city. Those that he didn’t work in personally, he knew the people who worked there doing security. So every shopping place has reminders of him, and every guard in a uniform looks like him when seen out of the corner of the eye – classic PTSD stuff.

Today we went shopping at Westfield. He did security there, but it is also one of the places where we know well, so are less likely to have a panic attack. We were fine at the book and toy shops – hey we’re librarians and many of the littles love looking toys… But for some reason Sophie was really upset about being there, despite her choosing to go there. It definitely had something to do with the ex-husband as she was trying to do the same nervous wedding ring twisting that she used to do to try and calm and soothe… But we no longer have the wedding ring or any ring… Because it wasn’t there, she panicked. So unlike Sophie…

Whenever he did anything to her, she’d just throw the blocks up to the rest of us and take it until it got too much… She always felt so guilty as she agreed to the marriage, even though Management said it wasn’t a good idea… Management is great at passive aggressive stuff, so just didn’t organise the wedding. She didn’t stop it on purpose, but just refused to organise it – which would usually be her role. But finally gave in two nights before the wedding and got the vows and other details sorted, but it was very much against her will.

No one blames Sophie for agreeing to the marriage, but she blames herself… She’s getting really bad flashbacks of things that he used to do. We don’t know how to stop it or help her… She’s our most emotional part, and she’s hurting…

What’s unfair is that she is the one who comforts everyone else, but we don’t have the skills to comfort her.

We’ve just woken up from nightmares, so are sitting at the computer distracting… As far as I know the nightmares weren’t about the ex-husband, but for some reason we’re sitting here remembering how he used to enjoy our dissociation. It meant he could abuse us further, and he knew when the softer, gentler parts such as Sophie were present so that he could get away with greater levels of psychological abuse.

When we met him he admitted to having been abused by his sister and her friend from the age of 7. It stopped when he said it was to stop, which was when he was about 12-13. It affected him badly, and he was diagnosed with PTSD. But we think he had bigger issues happening in his brain, but they were never really addressed as he never attended therapy for any decent amount of time. When Management said that he was a sick puppy… well he was a sick puppy! The things he enjoyed and thought were beyond the scope of normal “kinkiness”.

Sometimes when we were bad, he would gain attention at his work by telling all his workmates the latest exploits of his wife’s trip up to the local psychiatric ward. He loved having to ring up his boss in the early hours of the morning while we were being assessed to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it to work because we were being assessed (again). This was despite the fact that we often went straight to work after these assessments. So he loved the attention that our craziness could bring… and also he hated work so used us as an excuse to get out of it whenever possible.

One of the things that we just realised… In the later part of the marriage, his time off work was starting to get him into trouble… so the attention he gained there had started to turn negative. This meant he had to try and get that level of positive attention with us. His description of positive attention involved cutting in front of us and the one we hadn’t realised until tonight… he used to mimic our dissociation and dissociative switches. We might be being unkind, but he only started doing it in the last 6 months that we were together, so it wasn’t an enduring pattern that had been with him since the start of the relationship which lasted a very long 8-9 years.

Our dissociative switching is fairly “smooth”. It usually just involves a sharp intake of breath, rapid blinking, slight cough or if there is an internal battle a zoning out for a short time. It was the zoning out, or blankness that he would mimic.

How very odd…

Hope he one day gets the help he needs… We don’t think he will as he refused to go to the court ordered family violence courses that were part of the Protection Order we were awarded against him. A big part of seeking the Protection Order was to protect other women from him. His final assault involved him attempting to strangle us, we knew from his stories that he’d tried to do the same thing to his mother before we met him. So he was into repeating patterns of violence. He was going to keep on repeating those patterns until he got some help. We’d tried to get him to go to get help for the last four years of our marriage… We gave up on that, and on us near the end.

As a follow up to the emails we sent our therapist, we sent this to try and get her to understand that why we thought it would be helpful to get an email answer to some important questions…

Hi Bob,

Regards
Kate

Having still received no response from her, we’re assuming that she’d prefer that we talk about it in therapy and for us to only get half the information. Just brilliant. The woman is intelligent, but we’re wondering if she’s so rule and boundary driven that she can’t see beyond those rules and boundaries.

We know that people need boundaries – boundaries are good. We’re the first to admit that our ideas around boundaries are messed up. But all we wanted is some really important questions answered in a safe way for us. Is that too much to ask? Well apparently the answer is “Yes”.

So now we have to try and find a new therapist… during the Christmas holidays. We know that last Christmas was a bad one for us. We know this, but have a total memory blank as to why it was bad. We know that we attempted suicide over the New Year holidays – Aimee did the post attempt assessment and told the rather nice young resident that she was too young to drink :) This all means that we’re potentially going to need outside help to keep safe during this time. The mother is coming up to stay with us over the holidays, but that brings all sorts of other tensions…

The need to find a decent therapist is high… The reality of finding one is going to be very hard. We contacted the only therapist in NZ who is listed on ISST-D. She got back to us yesterday to say that she didn’t know of anyone in our city with experience in treating the dissociative disorders. But she did recommend someone who lived closer to our city to see if they knew of someone who lives here… So just waiting to hear back from them. We’re hoping to find someone this way so that we don’t have to go through the painful process of interviewing the different people. It’s just too stressful to have to met these people and ask all sorts of questions.

It’s becoming very much like Vague commented on in our previous post – the therapy itself is becoming more stressful than the trauma work. What’s odd is that the current clinical psychologist hasn’t even touched on the trauma. She asks general questions about whether we’ve had a good or rough week, but nothing that can’t be deflected easily.

In our recent attempts to get some answers from our therapist, we sent the following emails…

We’re bad at code names… So she is “Bob” and we are “Kate”… Those who’ve watched Blackadder will understand this :)

Hi Bob,

Some concerns have arisen from the last few sessions. I realise that you would prefer us to raise these questions during a session, but these are ones that I need to think about your responses to quite extensively, so don’t want to risk a poor reaction that is out of context or un-necessary.

1. What diagnosis do you understand me to have?
2. What experience do you have in treating this diagnosis?
3. How long can I expect sessions with you to continue?
4. If ACC refuse to fund further sessions, do you have someone you recommend that I see who specialises in the area of this diagnosis?

To be honest, if I was working on the “one strike you’re out” mentality that you mentioned during yesterday’s session, sessions would have stopped a long time ago. All that occurred is that time was needed to process what you had said – nothing more, nothing less.

Yes, there is a certain level of black and white thinking – as is common with most survivors of trauma. However, this thinking is more turned on myself rather than others – if there is a misunderstanding, it is my fault; if there is evil, it is mine…

If you see resistance to change, this is because there is a feeling that you are attempting to change things without fully understanding what is occurring. Rules you established were done so with little understanding of the whole picture. There is a struggle to help people understand what goes on in this head as there are not the words to describe it – education background in Sciences rather than Arts/Social Sciences. So I know that the lack of communication as to what the full picture looks like is my fault. When attempts have been made to try and explain why the rules may not work, you don’t seem to be grasping the implications – again this is my inability to explain the full picture. There is again a lack of hope that I will be able to find help.

Regards
Kate

Bob’s response after being prompted to give a reply…

Hi Kate,
You are welcome to email me, but I do not think it would be helpful for you if we did therapy through email. I would rather we discussed therapy issues in sessions.
Kind regards
Bob

Well this response was fair enough… I’m sure most of her clients are better in this form of boundary… BUT WE’RE NOT!!!!!!!! Hence our response…

Hi Bob,

Thank you for responding. I understand your response, and it is reasonable. However, as I dissociate freely during therapy time, the answers you give won’t be remembered. I also don’t have the strength or level of trust to ask difficult questions during the session, so these will not be asked. Due to these factors I was attempting to have issues addressed in a way that is safe for me and allows time to reflect on the answers given.

No answer you give will surprise – you have the notes and the list of diagnoses given over the last three years. It’s not a list to be proud of, but it also means that there is nothing that will shock me.

As the next session will be a few days before Christmas, it is not a good time to discuss this then.

Regards
Kate

We were rather soft at the end, and possibly gave the impression that we are prepared to talk about it in a session some time next year… Trying to find a way of saying “Just give us the answers woman” without it sounding threatening or nasty.

To make things worse, we’ve had to cancel tomorrow’s therapy session because of this cold we have… So odds are she thinks we’re playing games or something… *sigh*

Well ok, so we can’t breathe freely because of the stupid cold we have… But financially we can breathe a little more easily. The money to assist in paying for our therapy has come through from ACC, so the huge debt we’d been stuck with from the separation and the cost of therapy has been eased a little…

We’re still in a rather large financial hole, but at least we’ll be able to buy food and petrol when we need it. Yes, we know there are other people out there struggling more than us… We also know that the only reason we’re haven’t had to declare bankruptcy is that most of the debt is a private loan – to the mother who won’t demand it back soon, but its tied to all sorts of other issues. So we’re grateful that we are able to live in a flat and feed our cat.

On the therapy front… We’d tried to get our therapist to answer some questions via email to see where she stands on what diagnosis she is treating us for, and what experience she has with this diagnosis. Her response was a fairly reasonable “we will talk about therapy while in therapy”. That’s fine, we’d love to be able to talk about this in therapy. However, we dissociate so much during therapy that we won’t remember the answers; and we just don’t have the courage or level of trust to ask these difficult questions while sitting in front of her. Will wait to see what her response to that is…

We’re physically sick… We sound like we’ve got sand paper in our voice box and our head is about to explode from the pressure in our sinuses… We feel like cr*p slightly warmed up…

What’s weird/interesting/odd about the whole physical illnesses thing and the DID is that we have different parts who have totally different symptoms. This is where we feel even more like a crazy attention seeking nut job… As an example Management and Sophie suffer from REALLY bad hay fever, but Aimee doesn’t get hay fever at all. We’ve been in therapy where we’ve switched from Aimee who was happy and enjoying chatting to our therapist; to Management who after about five minutes was in full hay fever mode with the runny nose, sore throat, watery eyes etc. The room hadn’t changed at all… no windows were open, no draft…

Katie has bad asthma whenever Sophie gets the hay fever, but Management doesn’t experience the asthma…

Just weird… we’ve read articles where this sort of thing has been studied, but it just seems really odd. We’re still part of the same body, so how do we react so differently to simple things like pollen?

Not many of us feel the body or we have such a high pain threshold that any physical injuries are rarely felt – this is what allowed us to work for 6 months on a broken leg. So that doesn’t change too much. It’s more the things like flu’s, colds and asthma…

Just weird… Or maybe we’re usual for a DID system??? Not sure…

—————-
Now playing: Finger eleven – One thing
via FoxyTunes

We’ve just been talking to a friend who asked about our grandparents – for some reason they just asked about our “nanna” – not “grandmother” but “nanna“. We called one set of our grandparents “Nan & Pop” and the other set “Nanna and Grandad”. Our Nanna had Parkinson’s Disease and passed away when we were quite young, but being asked about Nanna brought up this most amazing, beautiful memory…

The family were visiting them in Wellington and we’d had a bath and our hair was very long at that time. Because it was night and we should have been going to bed our Nanna told us to come over and sit in front of her chair on her foot stool… she towelled our hair partially dry then just brushed and brushed it until it was totally dry and so soft. We remember her scent – lavenders and the comforting feel of the brush being pulled through our hair.

We’d never felt so safe…

Made us cry happy tears for the first time in a long time…..
We love and miss you Nanna……
We’re sorry we didn’t tell you…..

In the “we are stupid” arena, we’ve excelled this week…

1. We gave our American friend this blog link – totally forgetting how our confusion about him would read from his perspective. Sorry :(
2. We’ve just sent an email to the clinical psychologist asking her what diagnosis she thinks we have and that we think she is moving ahead with changes without fully understanding the entire picture.
3. We’ve just spat the dummy in a team meeting and said things we shouldn’t have.

So sitting here at work feeling sick with the anxiety. Hate the physical symptoms of the anxiety – the headaches, the body pains, the heart racing…

Wishing that we could take so many things back, but we can’t. Wishing that we would hear from our clinical psychologist or friend to find out what damage we’ve done…

Just wanting to scream or release the tension somehow…