Scattered pieces

Ever get that feeling like your wading through molasses?  Like your trying to reach the other side of the river, but half way across the water has turned to sticky molasses that is trying to suck you under?  That’s what the last few weeks have felt like.  We’ve had little clues as to what has been causing this, but we’re at the point where we need to write them down in order to try and work them through.

1. We’re incredibly threatened by Liz
A healthy amount of challenging is appropriate from a therapist, but we’ve interpreted Liz’ experience in the dissociative disorders as a threat.  This is for many reasons, pretty much all of them could be assigned to our insecurities and negative experiences with previous mental health professionals.  We know that we can work on this by trying to communicate with Liz as much as we can – we’re starting to do this by giving her a copy of all of our YouTube work.  If nothing else, these clips give a different view-point into our experiences and interpretation of what is occurring.

2. We are increasingly aware of how anger effects us.
Several blogs we’ve read have lately have looked at the issue of anger, predominantly how it is expressed by the abuse survivor.  We do have this as an issue – some of us do feel anger which is not expressed appropriately.  Yes, some of us self-injure; but this is rare and those that do self-injure don’t seem to do it out of anger – or else the anger is off the scale to the point where they appear to be operating on auto-pilot.  But our main issue at the moment is being able to understand how anger is expressed by those around us.  When Kriss doesn’t contact us regularly, we interpret this as the brooding anger that the father exhibited while we were growing up.  Today the team leader was getting angry about a decision that the library manager had made, but was questioning and raising her voice at us instead of the library manager.  This triggered a young one to the point where we nearly crawled under the desk – not a good look for a supposedly mature librarian.

3. Terrified of making therapy about “us”
We know we’ve been in therapy for about 4-5 years, but most of that has been aimed at surviving the abusive marriage.  We’re now at the point where we have to go into therapy and concentrate on us and how we can heal.  This is terrifying!  We learnt from an early age that we are worthless and anything that we do to try and draw positive attention is futile.  Now we’re meant to spend at least an hour per week concentrating on what we need.  That concept is so triggering it’s incredible.

4. Memories of the perfect childhood.
Possibly to give us hope, or possibly just a way this brain plays with itself, we’ve been getting more images of the perfect childhood that some of us created in order to cope with what was happening to us.  It’s a beautiful childhood that involves having a dog, a garden etc.  What is interesting, is that even in our perfect childhood there is no real sense of having a family.

5. Terror that we’re going to get much worse before we get better.
When we see the hell that other survivors are going through, we worry that if we lift the lid on the emotions and memories that some of us hold, we’ll go through something similar.  It’s a very irrational fear based on looking for ways to block therapy and go into the unknown area of healing, but it’s something that hits us every now and again.  We know we’re lucky in our current level of functioning and are worried about losing that.  We also know that losing that functioning doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with healing.

6. Time-frames for healing.
Liz mentioned that it is reasonable to expect someone with Borderline Personality Disorder to have seven years of therapy before healing.  That is a really long time.  We don’t meet the diagnostic criteria for BPD, but it’s still indicative.  It’s still scary.  Management had a time-frame of being “cured” in six months when we first went to therapy, we knew within a couple of weeks that this time-frame wasn’t possible; but we’re scared of a process that could take years and what could happen in that time.  Part of this is because we have so little concept of time – if you’ve ever talked about seven years to a child, you know the sort of reaction that you can get.  We have a similar concept of time.

Trying to remember to take it a moment at a time.

Today we had a very interesting therapy session.  It slipped into the more familiar (and potentially dangerous) territory of playing with words.  Liz (codename for new therapist), is still trying to understand what we mean when we say certain words.  This sort of thing appeals to some of us who are familiar with verbal fencing.  We’re not word-smiths by any means, but our mind can do the mental agility needed for a debate.  This is potentially dangerous, in that it allows us to test Liz’ ability to keep up.  Our previous therapist (Carol) couldn’t keep up, and many of us weren’t able to respect her on an intellectual level because of this – which is pretty ripe considering we’re not a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but anyway…  Today Liz handled it well, she was able to spar back and gently questioned the beliefs behind some of the statements made.

What is interesting is that she’s now starting to realise that we don’t have a support network.  Our American friend was told over the weekend that his wife wants a divorce – naming his dissociative disorder as the main reason.  They were married and had the children before the dissociation became obvious and she has never really understood it - thank you to the partners of dissociatives who do make an effort to learn and understand.  Because of this news and the implications, he became suicidal.  We spent most of yesterday on the phone with him trying to convince him to give it a month before he makes any decisions.  I was pretty sure that we’d failed in convincing him and that we were never going to hear from him again.  He lives in Texas where the gun laws are pretty lenient – you just need to be an adult and have money, no waiting period or anything (what’s with that????).  Thankfully he didn’t have enough money for a gun.  He’s now planning to go to work tomorrow, so the immediate danger is over.  I know it’s just delayed, but he’s safe for now.

Anyway, my point about the support network…  We told her about being on the phone with him to talk him through it and she knew that we’d also been going through a bad patch of thinking, so asked who we talked to about it.  When we talked about people overseas being closer to us than anyone here, I think it finally sunk in that we have no one.

We’ve been struggling for the last two days to not take down all the posts that refer to the suicidal thinking, which we now see as babyish attention seeking.  But as a contrast, we’d be happy to talk to anyone we consider to be our friends if they were struggling with suicidal ideation or self-injury.  Our American friend wanted us to ramble to him today, just so he could be soothed by Sophie’s voice.  We did it for as long as possible, but Sophie isn’t very good at rambling :)

The other testing we did with Liz today was ask her why she considered us to be DID.  She had mentioned something about our dissociation prior to our asking, so it wasn’t out of the blue.  But it made some of us curious and more than a little guarded – in some respects Liz is a greater threat to our system in that she has other DID clients.  What if she looks at us and says we do or don’t have DID?  Which would be worse?  Previous to Liz, the therapists have been well meaning and skilled, but not in the dissociative disorders.  So Liz poses a threat to some – what if she spots the switching?  What if she SEES us?  We can feel the tug of war happening already – some want to move forward and heal, some want to stay hidden so no one can hurt us again.  What is slightly amusing is that W was the main questioner regarding why Liz thought we were DID, and is also one of the ones who wants to stay hidden…

W is so brave and tough, but she had to be…

Today a series of very random events occurred which has me convinced that we’re going to be OK :)

1. Someone at work asked if we were OK.
2. We talked about the suicidal ideation on this blog and in a private forum.  There was no internal backlash as a result, and people didn’t reject us for the overwhelming emotions that were going on in this head.
3. Thanks to a link to Musicovery given by Sam’s Bold and Creative Alter, One got to listen to some B.B. King and Van Morrison – we forgot how much some of us rely on music to soothe and restore energy.
4. A job was advertised which would suit our skills perfectly.  It would give us job satisfaction and mean moving from this house which has so many bad memories associated with it.
5. We went and got HEAPS of rental DVD’s to watch – some of which are 8 day hires.
6. The nature of our Polyvore sets have changed…

5 days ago…

4 days ago…

3 days ago…

Today…

This may look as if they’re getting darker – and they are in colour. But they’re now reaching out… Four and five days ago they were about suicide, three days ago it changed to walking a line and today it was about reaching out. The ones doing these sets are working through it!!!

We’re not out of danger by any means… but I’m certain we’re going to be safe.

I think I’ll still organise a few days off work as we’re heading into another review of the re-structuring process which is a layer of stress we just don’t need.

Thank you to everyone who has helped, commented and just been there for us over the last week. It is appreciated, more than you know…

Early in the week we contacted the mother about going for a visit to try and break the cycle of suicidal ideation that we’re experiencing.  She didn’t answer, so we called her a couple of nights ago to see what she thought.  She pointed out that we would have to interact with the sister and sister-in-law if we went there – not a positive thing.  The main theme of the conversation revolved around going there not being a good idea and several times re-enforcing that she couldn’t come up here.  We said several times that we weren’t asking anyone to come up here… *sigh*

After this conversation, we thought we’d go for the road trip to get out of town for awhile.  We started to organise for our cat to go into a boarding place etc.  But one night as we were stroking her to sleep and telling her (and us) that she’ll be nice and safe in the boarding place, this young voice said “cos we won’t be back”.  It hit us then that parts of this brain were planning for a suicide while we were out of town.  I knew that suicide would have been a possibility as we would have organised everything for us not being here – work, cat etc.  We’re convinced that if we died, within a week we’d be forgotten.  Taking a week off work would have fitted that criteria.  But I didn’t consciously consider this a real threat until this young one piped up.  Maybe I just didn’t want to know about the plans?  Not sure…

That brought us back to having no plan to break the cycle.  Then last night the mother calls again and asks if we’re going down to her.  I know we’re hearing impaired and can mis-understand things, but earlier in the week it was a very clear that we weren’t encouraged to go there, now we are??  The mother has said that she expects us to commit suicide one day, so maybe the first call was a defense mechanism on her part?  Or, maybe she just couldn’t be bothered talking to us that night – we rarely call her anyway.

I know the sensible thing would be to go for an assessment for respite or in-patient care.  But we’re so badly triggered by hospitals that it would cause a further downward spiral.  We also appear to be still high functioning, so we would probably be just seen as attention seeking.

Not quite sure what to do.

Today we went and saw the new therapist for our fourth session.  It didn’t go well.  The need to self injure and the level of suicidal ideation has been increasing steadily for the last few weeks.  Because we’re switching so rapidly when even mildly stressed, we were all over the place in the session.  The only techniques she had to try and keep us present or in the room was to get us to describe three things we could see, hear or feel.  At the best of times we have very little body sensation, so asking us to describe a tactile feeling is difficult – when she asked us to describe the feeling of our jeans under our palms we answered that it was rough, because we know denim should feel rough.  Regarding things we hear, well we’re hearing impaired so we could only hear the rain.  Visually we usually look at a spot on the floor which allows us to see a majority of the floor space, that way we can monitor anyone approaching us from our peripheral vision. But today because of the anxiety and need to protect, our vision narrowed and we could only see small patches straight in front of us.  When she asked us to look up at a fan, we couldn’t do it until our fifth attempt and a switch to someone who could look around.

After the session we went to work.  When going to get a hot drink we realised that we really need some help to ensure our safety.  We’re thinking of going for a visit to our home town for a week.  Not sure if it would help or trigger us further.  Not sure if we can even do it, as we would have to find someone to look after our cat.  Just know that things are getting a little out of control.  It’s not too bad, but we’re doing stupid things – writing a comment on Discussing Dissociation and not putting our point across clearly so it was misunderstood, not being able to think through things logically at work, finding sets we’ve done on Polyvore that have suicidal themes…

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Now playing: Brooke Fraser – Lifeline
via FoxyTunes

Over that last week, there has been an increased need to self-injure. Several things happened over Easter which triggered the need, and it has been growing despite our efforts to distract. Last night it was particularly bad. M was wanting to call the crisis line when we got home from work if the need didn’t ease.  This coincided with our American friend contacting us again. The conversation with him was exactly what we needed.

At the start of the conversation we were actually honest with him and said that we needed to self-injure and described the type of self-injury it would be.  His response was so simple – we can keep on talking for as long as it takes for it to ease.  We really needed to hear that.  No questions, no acceptance of it being one of our coping strategies, just support to help us through it.

This is the friend we remember.

We don’t have to pretend to be fine with him.  We don’t have to smile.  He calls us on us asking about him all the time and not saying anything about what we’re going through.

He knows us, he’s seen all of our YouTube stuff and more.  He understands it and admits that some of the stuff in this head scares him.  If anyone else said this to us we’d be insulted, but with him it’s OK.  We’ve also seen him at low points, so it’s the sort of statement that can only be said by someone who has been there and let us see a little of that as well.

There was also no need to please him.  Just to curl up on the couch and talk until the urge to harm eased down to a more controllable level…  He doesn’t read this blog, but I thank him for being there.

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Now playing: The Feelers – Stand Up
via FoxyTunes

We’re not invisible.  We did a set on Polyvore called Layers and people are adding it to their favourites.  W is going crazy… she’s screaming for us to be invisible again.  She was the one who had most of the input into the set, she thought it was awful and ugly and disgusting.  She can’t just take it down, because other people have commented on it now, if you remove it they’ll think we’re crazy.  It will look like we’re attention seeking, and she doesn’t want any attention from anyone.

Need to be invisible.
No one can hurt if you’re invisible.
No one can hurt you if you’re not there.

She was wanting to self-injure, but did the set instead.  It eased the need to hurt, but the result of the mild attention caused by the set has triggered her through the roof.  She did something really positive as a coping strategy, and the result ended up with a bigger trigger than the original urge…

On Friday we were feeling really good.  It was fairly quiet internally and there was a sense that we were OK.  We even did some YouTube stuff.  Then out of the blue, our American friend we hadn’t heard from in 3-4 months contacted us.  Yesterday we called him and it was a rather odd conversation.  He mentioned that we seemed much more integrated now.  Not sure how accurate this is, and it’s in direct contrast to a statement from Kriss who wonders if he’ll ever be able to talk to me without the protection of the others being there.   I’ve often wondered how the dissociative protection appears for the significant people in our lives, it must be very confusing for them.  I know when we were in high school one of our friends mentioned that we used to get a very nasty expression on our face for no apparent reason – I’m now pretty sure this was some sort of dissociative switch or trigger reaction.  It also helps explain why we didn’t make friends easily (at all?)…

We’re still really shaky and numb from the phone call.  I don’t know all of what was said, and most of it has been taken away from me.  I know we talked for just over two hours, but I only remember about 20 minutes of it, if that.

As for the mindless games – well this one isn’t so much mindless as REALLY addictive and frustrating, it’s called Fantastic Contraption.  The basic principle is that you have to build a contraption to move a piece of block from one area to another.  Kriss sent me the link, and is just a little annoyed that while he was still working on level three we got to level six :)  We have a young one who is great with this sort of problem solving.

As a final note, it seems that this year it’s televisions turn to beat up on Dissociative Identity Disorder – first United States of Tara and now another Criminal Minds episode…  Movies like Beautiful Mind were seen as a fairly accurate description of what it is like to live with Schizophrenia, but also received awards and made box office millions.  Why can’t the entertainment industry learn from this?  Do it well, or don’t do it at all.  But then, I suppose if they lived by that ethic there would be very few television shows or movies produced - and the problem with that would be???

Looking at the blog posts and polyvore sets we’ve created over the past few months, it’s obvious (to us) that Management hasn’t been around much.  Our focus has been lacking and much of the structure that she introduced into our life to keep us safe has been lost.  I’m not quite sure why Management hasn’t been present – I think it was a combination of the way in which Bob (previous therapist) wanted to use her within the healing context and the way in which she has been treated by some people (the American friend used to call her a bitch).  She’s not a bitch.  She’s rule driven and incredibly focused which can be intimidating, but it doesn’t make her a bitch.  She isn’t intentionally rude to anyone and is incredibly gentle with the younger ones on her floor and any external children.

By the way, she’s smiling at the concept of me defending her :)

What’s interesting is that Management, one of our most functional and high achieving ones, has been absent predominantly because of people around us putting her down or using her in subtle ways.  Even our high achiever has insecurities.  I think this links into the idea raised by Samo’s site Who do you love when you say I love you.  When we tried going through the questions posed in the site, we replied “No” to the first one.  I think the big problem for us, is that we don’t understand each other or what we do.  We can often see the actions of the different ones, but we don’t know the reasons – or if we know the reasons they are so different from our usual morals that we can’t identify with the need for them to be there.  This again became obvious over the weekend.  We were very low because of the memories surrounding the loss of our unborn baby, and this allowed/encouraged the dysfunctional patterns of the old behaviours to kick in.

One form that this dysfunction takes is the need S has to please men.  We know that this behaviour saved us from greater hurt when we were growing up, but it scares us now.  We respect S for the role she played in keeping us as safe as possible while we were young (that is we love her), but we don’t understand her role in our life today (that is, we don’t love her behaviour).  Intellectually we know that she helps us cope with sex, but we also know that she uses it as a form of self-injury.  Over the weekend the pattern started again.  Thankfully nothing happened, but it added a feeling of self-disgust to the other layers of rubbish that we were already heaping on ourselves.

It’s so frustrating…