Scattered pieces

Hmmm not much to say…. It’s 5am, we have to go to work in 2.5 hours…
Just can’t sleep….
No nightmares…
No flashbacks….
Just can’t sleep….

We’ve always been bad sleepers. We used to have a penlight that we used to read our book with all night if possible. We also grind our teeth while we sleep, so it’s never a restful sleep… always full of tension and anxiety.

What’s strange is that we’ve developed this leg jiggling thing while we’re sitting at the computer. Not sure what its about or if it happens with all of us, but its kinda annoying. Wonder if we do it at work too?

Hmmm as you can probably tell, feeling very disconnected again. Starting to worry about therapy this week as the last thing the therapist said to us as we did the crazy arsed walking out the door was “we’ll talk about this next week”. Not sure what we’re going to be talking about, but have an awful feeling its the flashback. Really hoping we just zoned out on her during the flashback and didn’t do the rocking or the total re-living thing. Something scarily vulnerable about doing a flashback in front of someone.

Flashbacks suck!

Ohh well better go back to bed and pretend that we’ll get some more sleep. Probably won’t, but ya never know what could happen in the little city.

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Ok, so we managed to get respite organised. They said they would extend the stay out for two weeks if we needed it – they were really nice :)

But then we got there… PANIC… They forgot to mention that the respite place was an old converted hospital! We can’t do hospitals. One of our worst triggers. Sure it had been converted and re-decorated and everything, but it was still looking like an old hospital. We lasted about an hour and 2mg of clonazepam. They tried having someone there that we could call on for help, and then leaving us totally alone. Then they nicely asked if we thought we could cope. Well did a bit of craziness then bugged outta there!

They drove us around to the local psyc ward as they were concerned about our level of safety, but were released after being assessed by some resident who didn’t know much. Random question – why do they make the least experienced people in the hospital do assessments?????

So we’re back home with our cat… lol.

Hating what our clinical psychologist and psychiatrist are going to say considering that they were the ones that organised the whole thing! Caught between feeling like a failure for not being able to stay at a respite place and just pure relief for having gotten outta there! It was a place where we were meant to relax and be safe for goodness sake… But no, we freak out just cos of the shape and feel of the building. How pathetic is that?

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Yesterday we were told that we should go into respite care for a week to try and keep the body safe during the period of the ex-husband’s birthday. Not sure if we can – how can we leave our gorgeous cat in a boarding place?? I know that logic probably seems off, but she is one of the reasons we have to stay safe at home, she relies on us.

Told our therapist this via text – can imagine her rolling her eyes and calling us crazy. Well to most people there is no logic to it. Ok there’s probably no logic for anyone, but it’s one of the things we use as a coping mechanism.

Pretty sure we can stay safe, just have to use all our coping mechanisms and strategies… We have to work on Saturday too. That will help.

Would love to be able to control the ideation…

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In a week’s time it is the birthday of the ex-husband.
Really wishing that fact didn’t matter…
Wishing that day isn’t already causing fear and anxiety…
Wishing we hadn’t been so organised and programmed the birthday into our cellphone so that it would send a reminder a week ahead of the date…

None of those wishes are going to happen this year.

This is what the previous birthdays have generally involved…
This will trigger

1. Getting him breakfast.
2. Morning sex – hopefully not a rape
3. Hopefully us going to work – he usually took the day off and spent it playing with his car and watching online pornography.
4. Going out to dinner and him having a few drinks.
5. Hopefully he had finished watching the pornography, but sometimes he hired some videos so had to watch that and then have VERY rough sex.
6. We would get up afterwards and try to recover by playing games online and try to calm the internal chaos or to fill the void created by an internal silence.

The pattern changed a little over the years with him sometimes demanding we had the day off as well and “go somewhere”. We always hoped that it would be to go over to Mt Mauganui, but sometimes it wasn’t.

Avoiding him was impossible. Our only way of coping was to dissociate into a young state who was used to the roughness and encouraged it in order for the whole experience to be over sooner.

Just shaking so much and wishing that these anniversaries would be over… We’d forgotten about his birthday until our clinical psychologist asked if there were any more coming up. Someone remembered. How can we not know what day, month or year it is but know that an anniversary is coming?

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Today we went to therapy for the first time in a month. It was hard walking in the door considering all that had happened. Not sure if it was the subject matter of the session, or the amount of dissociation that happened, but it felt like a really long session…

She started off with trying to find ways in which to give us more support. Getting other organisations involved in our care. Sort of made us feel like we were being too difficult and a hopeless case again! We know that we need other avenues of help – a therapist can’t be available 24/7. Also our Mental Health Crisis lines are useless, so the usual ways of getting that assistance aren’t available. So while we’re anxious about having to get to know more people and more people knowing about our craziness, we know it makes sense.

Then came the bomb shell. She thinks our internal house is rather crowded – we know of about 25 alters, not all of whom are active. We don’t need that many, why don’t we ask someone to leave?

SAY WHAT????

She suggested it like it was nothing. Sort of like putting out the old chair you’ve had for ages that is kind of comforting, but isn’t really used anymore. She asked whose role within the system is no longer needed, their function no longer required. They would be the ones to be asked to leave.

SAY WHAT????

How do you ask someone to leave?
How do you know their role is no longer required?
What if we ask the wrong part to leave?

She asked if we wanted to change… Of course we said “Yes”… Of course we want to change! We can’t keep on going like we are – we got drunk last week for the first time in about a year. We were tempted to go buy some more after this session with her :( We can’t go back to the alcohol.

But how do we chose who should go? What if they hold some memory or something that we’re not aware of that is vital for our healing or functioning?

It’s tempting to ask a part like Frank to leave. He’s angry, he’s nasty and he abuses other parts of the system. But he also protects us from some of the angrier states. He enforces the safety plans.

Just a mess…

Once we decide who should go, how do we ask them to leave? What happens? We could just fake the whole leaving thing, but we can’t do that.

Craziness piled on top of craziness…

—————-
Now playing: Sarah McLachlan – I Will Remember You [Live]
via FoxyTunes

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Yesterday our clinical psychologist got a hint of the anger/angry states that are in this mind.

With the craziness over the last few days Sophie ended up calling the Mental Health Crisis Line. They always start off with wanting to know your name, address and phone number – well she could do the name and address, but with us changing our phone numbers so recently to the confidential ones she couldn’t remember them. Instead of the “nice” crisis line worker saying something like “Oh have you got them written down somewhere that you can check”, she said “well how are the CAT team going to contact you?” Now you can quite rightly call us crazy, but when someone calls a crisis line, they’re strangely enough IN A CRISIS… Their thinking is altered… Their logic off kilter… So you can’t expect them to think through how to get those numbers. So Sophie just thanked her for her help and hung up – yes even in a crisis she’s polite :)

So fast forward to yesterday, we get a text from our clinical psychologist asking if we were ok… we were for once honest and said “No”! She said that the CAT team had contacted her because they were concerned about us, and so was she… Well that was not such a good thing to say when we’d been asking for her help for the last month, and the psychiatrist she recommended had been slack with our medication! So Frank decided it was time to tell the clinical psychologist something! Frank is a rather angry part that often comes forward when we’re in hospitals and when our defences are weak. His main language is swearing, with the occasional noun thrown in just to connect the swear words…

Problem is we all have amnesia for when Frank is present. So we just lost the afternoon. The thing that made us realise that he’d sent a text was that the phone settings had been changed – he likes using capitals! So after a rather frantic search we found the honest, but not diplomatic text he sent :( This meant we had to apologise to her for the language… It’s still our brain doing it so it’s still our responsibility to try and fix.

Will be interesting to see what happens when we have our appointment with her on Friday – more than a little worried about it!

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For some reason this weekend has been a rough one. Wondering if its because we had Friday off to make up some professional development time? Not sure. But we’re now sitting in front of the computer wondering how we can go back to being “normal” or probably more accurately “usual”?

Our coping skills went out the window over the weekend and we ended up getting drunk on Friday and self injuring on Saturday. Haven’t done either in months. We couldn’t call the crisis lines, not sure why, possibly because the fear of either being taken to hospital or just getting bad service. We texted our clinical psychologist and she wanted us to go into respite for the weekend… That’s the equivalent of getting us sectioned as the angry ones come forward thinking they have to protect us within the hospital environment, so lash out angrily – never physical harm to others, but lots of verbal anger and self-injury. Even then they never swear at anyone that I’m aware of.

So how do you get normal back? How do you go back to even the level of dissociation we had before the car accident? We functioned so well… Ok so some of it wasn’t healthy, but we were so “with it”. We could cope with anything… People used to say that in the marriage we were the strong ones, always coping and moving along. Some of the women at work said that they pitied the ex-husband because we were so bossy – little did they know he abused us on every level as soon as their backs were turned.

We kinda like how we coped back then. We now realise much of it was we had coping mechanisms in place that we weren’t aware of – never go shopping when it was busy, always choose the checkout person at the end so no one was behind us etc. But now its a fight to leave the house if it doesn’t involve going to work! We can’t do basic things most NZers do like hang out the washing on the line. We have to build up strength and prepare for a week just to mow the lawns.

We haven’t seen our clinical psychologist for an appointment in a month. It’s now really starting to show. We’re falling apart at the seams. The need to escape is so high and we can’t do our usual thing of going for a drive to the lake – that would involve going over a bridge. We wish we could self-soothe in some way, but we can’t. Mind you while we’ve been sitting at the computer for most of the day we’ve been rocking… Thing is some of us hate the rocking, thinking its such a baby thing to do, so the ones that rock get told off and are told to grow up.

What’s really worrying, is that when we’re like this we’re at the most vulnerable for the ones who need to feel needed through satisfying men to come forward. Thank goodness the ex-husband is gone or we’d be using him for self-punishment now.

Wishing that we could just eliminate the last three years of our life and go back to how it was. We know we can’t. We know there are positives about healing, just some weeks make it seem so difficult and not worth the journey.

We’ve got an appointment to see the clinical psychologist on Friday, hopefully we can make it to then without breaking…

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We’re always stunned at what a difference being at work does for us. We’ve always hidden and in order to hide at work, we have to appear “normal” or usual – that is minimal switching and no switching to negative states in front of others. So yesterday we returned to work and it was like there was an immediate stepping back of all the chaos.

The ideation is still there, but that’s not unusual. Most states get that to certain degrees – for some of the young ones it’s a need to runaway, for the older ones it’s a need to escape. Weird thing is that we don’t meet the criteria for clinical depression, so we always confuses the crisis lines and the psychiatrists. They don’t get that someone can want to escape without meeting all the other criteria for depression.

So we’re back at work being our usual selves. Switching in order to fulfil our job requirements – Management is great with the business side of things, Sophie does the social side, W does the heavy maths and logic etc. But this is what we do. This is why we can usually work and be considered high achievers. This is why we can come to work and keep going despite being sectioned over the weekend or getting no sleep the night before.

We know many people who aren’t able to maintain this level of apparent functioning, so we consider ourselves lucky. Therapists have considered that our working like this is our ultimate distraction from having to face our issues, and they’re probably right. But there is only so much we can cope with in any one week. Speaking only for us, we need that distraction of work. It is tied to so many of our mixed up messages that we got growing up, and also to our ideas of needing to be independent and not being able to rely on anyone but ourselves and the system.

We admire those that are healing as a full-time job. It is something that we don’t have the strength to do. We can’t even agree on some of the abuse that took place, let alone have to deal with it!

So today is a good day… Things are back to the normal level of oddness.

We’re also doing a photography course. Our clinical psychologist gave us an ultimatum that we had to either get out, or go do volunteer work for the elderly. Considering that with our luck we’d get to know the nice lady and she’d pass away; we decided for the more impersonal photography course. We were thinking of doing one anyways, so it was just a good poke to get us moving. Sometimes we need to be prodded :)

Also seems like we haven’t totally blown the friendship we thought we’d successfully destroyed the other night. Things are back to tentative contact… :) We really shouldn’t be allowed out when we’re so switchy and all over the place!

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At what point are you allowed to give up?
When are you allowed to say “that’s it, they’ve won”?
What do you do when you’re ready to say that?
Why do people put so much value on life?

Our psychologist wants us to go to the psyc ward to keep the body safe.
I don’t know if we can.
Hospitals destroy us.
They rip your soul apart and empty you all fight.
If you show any emotion you’re considered dangerous and unstable – even if the emotion is justified.

We just want to world to stop and let us get off.
We know this is because of the ACC, Police, husband, wedding anniversary etc.
But isn’t that enough?
We aren’t making any of it up – I really wish we were.

We can’t cope with all of this and keep on pretending everything is fine.
We cried at work when we found out that the husband had lied his way out of trouble for breaching the Protection Order.
We can’t sleep.
We can’t stand silence.
We have to have our back to the wall or else we imagine him coming up behind us.
We can’t sleep in the bed as that is where he hurt us soooo much.

WE CAN’T COPE!!!!
WE GIVE UP!!!!

We don’t care if it looks like we’re letting those that abuse us win – they have!
They have destroyed us.
Our soul is destroyed.
Our mind is in tatters.

Ultimate irony is that we try so hard to give other people hope cos we always think they are worth so much.
They are strong enough to get through this and get back onto the healing journey.
We can’t get that about ourselves.
We’re sick of the healing journey that is slowly destroying us.
We’re useless evil scum that deserved everything that happened.

Just wish we could step aside and let the suicidal ones take over.
But there is still some form of preservation.
But its more concern about who will take care of our cat.

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So we’re badly dissociating today… not switching, just spacey and dissociative.
In some ways its worse when it doesn’t go to the full level of switching, cos at least if we switch then the spaciness usually goes and we can focus.
Probably the lack of sleep causing this, not sure… But its not nice!

Waiting to hear from the clinical psychologist about further appointments – she had used up all the other funded ones without getting more approved. We need structure, so not knowing when the next appointment will be is making everything feel so much worse. Feel really close to breaking today and as if we’re just going to run or cry. As we don’t cry it will be the running…

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