Scattered pieces

The activity for this months Expressive Arts Carnival is to:

Use any visual means (e.g., drawing, painting, photography) to represent, in an abstract way, your experience of all or part of your internal world. The key to the activity is to focus on an abstract representation. The reason for this focus is that it helps us to describe our experiences in a way that is not so familiar to us.

First off, I’m not good with abstract thinking or art, let alone putting the two together; so this activity has proven to be a bit of a challenge.

Saying that, here are our  attempts to represent what our internal world looks like…

Internal World: Part I

This one was heavily influenced by M.  It’s a very structured view, and I think comes from her place of being a little apart from the rest of us.  I think it’s possibly more of an abstract system map, rather than a representation of our inner world.

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Internal World: Part II

Well, our internal world according to Aimee and K (with help from Sophie)… They like the baby moose playing, and the mother moose always watching to make sure nothing will hurt them :)

I’m not sure if this is really a representation of our internal world for a majority of us, but I think it’s accurate for these two young ones… or how they’d like it to be???  They also love the clip, so wanted an excuse to put it on the blog…

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Internal World: Part III

In the shadows, waiting.

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Internal World: Part IV

Which leads to the final representation… the one that all of us agree to some extent represents our internal world, or a very important part of it…

Shadows…  The lower left corner represents areas which are in total darkness, while the upper right corner represents areas which are flooded with light. These two extremes are linked by varying degrees of shadow intensity.

This was an interesting exercise to do… Thank you Paul for providing the prompts.

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Now playing: Five For Fighting – 100 Years
via FoxyTunes

I think I’ve mentioned here before that we have a young one called Aimee who is 9, happy and illiterate.  Similar to S being a sexual being, I’d pigeon-holed Aimee in this way, quite forgetting all the other things she does for us.  Quite often in therapy, if we’re worried about saying something that is a little scary, we’ll ask Aimee to say it for us – things like we’re scared of talking about food, etc.  She’s also incredibly happy, no matter what is happening.  When things are too out of control, she’s often nowhere to be found, but when we’re tired beyond belief, she will often be there to help us through.  To put it bluntly, she’s incredible…  If there’s any aspect of the different ones that we’d like to have consistent access to, it’s Aimee’s optimism.

Over the years, Aimee has learned that she can communicate with people online if she gets one of the others to read and write for her.  Usually this job was Sophie’s, but recently W was doing the interpreting for Aimee.  What we’ve noticed, is that with W doing the reading and writing, suddenly Aimee seems to be able to do more reading and writing herself.  It’s not like she’s gone to school and suddenly learned how to read, but rather some of W’s literacy seems to have leaked over to Aimee.  It’s the first tangible sign of healing and growth that I have seen within the system…  I know this may sound silly, but yesterday was a very long day filled with triggers and sharing of secrets, so Aimee suddenly being able to read and write a little bit is huge.

I know that this should be a further lesson in why I shouldn’t stereotype or pigeon-hole any part within the system.  I suppose I get caught up in wanting them to be one- or two-dimensional and forget that some of the different ones are quite complex personalities.  Recent blog reading would indicate that it would be easier to heal if the different ones weren’t so complex, but even the act of one part becoming seemingly more complex has given me hope… Aimee is becoming less extreme in her personality, so maybe that means we will all move toward being more balanced and co-operative…

Reading and writing signify intelligence, high scholarly expectations and being serious…  This is why I think Aimee was never able to read or write, those skills don’t fit with her role of being happy and carefree.  So if she is now reading and writing, but still happy, her personality is becoming more complete and rounded.  Whether this means she will be integrated, or continue to exist as a separate one within the system, I don’t know.  But I see it as an important step in our healing process…

I’m writing this from a respite care house :) Respite care is a very odd experience. I’m in a normal house on a normal street with a “normal family”. I’ve just had the most surreal evening meal with this family… They blessed the food (mild trigger, but nothing too bad), ate, talked and joked. There were no undercurrents, no tension, no unspoken hostility… It was very, very odd. I haven’t experienced that in my adult life ever. I’ve never witnessed a family who loved and joked without malice. I still don’t know what to make of it all.

My room is simple and comforting. I’m the only “client” here, and they have a capacity of three clients at any one time. There are no locks on any of the internal doors – including the bathroom, which is a little triggering, but it still feels safe! I’ve felt welcomed into the home without reservation. They don’t care about my diagnosis or what has led me here. There is just warm comforting acceptance. They’re not the Crisis Team trying to therapise me, they’re just a normal family who accept strangers into their house with basic guidelines in place.

There was a visitor for dinner who has mental health issues and is going through the DBT program, she convinced me that the program, as delivered here, wouldn’t suit me. It was interesting to talk to her though. It sounds like her world fell apart and she is now struggling on an invalids benefit. I can see how that could so easily have been me. But instead my current level of dissociation keeps me on a different level of functioning.

So I am safe! I’m writing this from my iPhone as my computer access is non-existent (as is access to a spell checker *sigh*). I’m trying not to worry about the silly things, like my crops in FarmVille and Farm Town dying while I’m here. But the little things will get to me every now and again. I’ve been told that I can stay as long as I need to get myself back to ground; as I’m somewhere out Pluto way at the moment, that could take awhile.

On a random note… Our door has a painting of Tigger on it, which pleases Aimee immensely :)

It’s now Christmas Day in New Zealand – 2.30am on Christmas Day to be exact.  Aimee desperately wants to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a safe holiday.

We know that this time of year can bring pain to survivors of abuse and those from dysfunctional families… Our hope is that those painful memories are eased and positive traditions are created.

Take care of you and yours this holiday season,
CG

When we started this blog over a year ago, we never thought we’d maintain it for any length of time.  We’d previously tried journaling in paper format and never been able to maintain it for longer than a week.  We never knew what to say, and quite frankly the idea of writing down our thoughts was terrifying.  This is possibly why we had so much trouble with doing a time-line with Liz on Monday.  I know that we consider the written word incredibly important – our escape while growing up, was to curl up in the Sun somewhere and read for hours on end, escaping into an imagined world.  Books and words were our safety, journaling and written based therapy exercises could be seen as a threat to that sense of safety.  Online blogs aren’t tactile, and we associate online writing with work, so we can do this as it doesn’t have the same emotional ties that a book has.

In many ways, we treat this blog as our journal.  The problem is that we know we have a small group of readers for our work here, so we can’t be as honest as we should and we get hung up with worrying about others perceptions of us.  We’ve tried creating separate online journals, but each of these has failed over time.  It is often when we need to write the most, that we shut down and don’t write anything.  Instead of reaching out and trying to express/process the pain, we go back to our old coping mechanisms of cutting everything and everyone off.  It’s only recently that I’ve been called on this – friends and Liz have accused me of shutting them out, I know I do it and can see it happening, but am powerless to stop it (at the moment).

Now that we have this site, we’re going to start another journal.  Maybe this one will work, I don’t know.  Today we went to the Zoo and it was interesting as Aimee wanted to write about the trip here.  But she is 9 and nearly illiterate, I wouldn’t expose her/us like that here, but it is the sort of thing that we should add to a private blog.  Looks like I’ll have to get M moving on creating the new private journal :)

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Now playing: Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 3 in E flat major (‘Eroica’), Op. 55: Marcia funebre, Adagio assai
via FoxyTunes