2009 February 14 | Scattered pieces

Caught between the old and the new…

Posted February 14th, 2009 by castorgirl and filed in ACC, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Domestic violence, Friends, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Sleep, Therapy

Tags: Abuse, ACC, Clinical psychologist, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Domestic violence, Friends, PTSD, Sleep, Therapy

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So many aspects of our life right now are caught between old and new patterns, things, behaviours etc. A therapist would probably describe it as a turning point, in that we can now see how damaging the past has been, but not yet healed enough to be able to fully challenge those old of ways of thinking and behaving.

Sometimes we can see glimpses of a healthy reaction to a situation. Sometimes we’re flipped back into the old patterns and coping mechanisms. Our reaction to Kriss is probably the most obvious example of this. If he is not having a good day or is tired, we can sometimes see that it’s something that he has to manage – with our help if needed. Unfortunately, most of the time we look for what we have done wrong, for him to be playing games with us or to be getting sick of having to deal with us.

The intellectual response is to realise that this is our PTSD and domestic violence patterns kicking in. Problem is that we still can’t change our behaviour and reactions even though we know the reasons why. The mixed messages from within make it impossible to decipher the true reason for him not having a good day. The young parts fall into the only pattern of behaviour they know – “it’s our fault”; the angry ones consider him to “be a typical man that we need to get rid of”; the intellectuals argue about whether he is a good man, or we’re hoping he’s a good man but he’s actually just like the others and we’re fooling ourselves. It’s exhausting to have this constantly going on.

This sort of thinking can go into every part of our life. We know that this is often the reason that we can’t sleep – the brain is going too fast for it’s own good. But the brain is all we know, we have very little awareness of the body – it’s too unreliable…

In the “well fancy that” files, we got the report to ACC from Bob yesterday. She did consider us to be DID, she mentioned talking to alters and our “fragile personality structure”. I now think that she was quite worried about that fragility, so as a result tried to rush an integration in an attempt to stop further splits. If only we’d all been able to talk about it, things might have gone differently with her. We’ll see what happens when we have an appointment with Carol (new codename for previous therapist).