Hi,
I’m doing very well, thank you! I am still amazed at how this is even possible, but my DID symptoms have been gone for months now after the Ibo and I’m becoming confident they won’t come back.
Re externalising splits, here is an example of what I mean: my father has a deep fear/hatred of women. So when I was a child, he would often mock the women in our family for anything he deemed feminine while rewarding anything he deemed worthy of a ‘real man’. This of course comes from his own upbringing in which he was required to repress all his ‘soft’ or feminine features to become ‘tough and manly’. Because he hates the feminine in himself, he projects it on other people and punishes it there.
Because I wanted to please him, I initially did the same as a child – tried to split my ‘masculine’ from my ‘feminine’ side and repress the latter. This way I ended up with a female and a male alter who were entirely separate entities, one happy and upbeat (because he was the ‘right’ sort of person), one depressed and full of self-hatred because she was ‘wrong’. All the while I saw my father as a coherent person and myself as split. When Ibo showed me this I could suddenly clearly see how the rift between the masculine and feminine runs through HIM, how I had replicated HIS split in my own psyche. Then I could say to him in my mind “you can have your split back now, I don’t need it any more” and my alters could merge. If my father ever chose to do the same (unlikely), he might turn around to his own father and give him back his split, and his father to his, etc., handing that BS all the way back through the generations til Adam and Eve or so.
Of course, my father was only a representative of the male/female split that dominates our whole society. I could just as well have said, there is a patriarchy out there that teaches that male and female have to be separate and I refuse to embody this idea on political grounds – that would be another example of externalising the split. The point is recognising that the split was imposed from the outside at some point, for a particular reason, and it should go back outside (this is what my signature means as well)
Threats to executing intention with learned certainty(moving hand, going somewhere) invokes the fear response.
Interesting – is that why Narcs react so badly to anything they deem to be a threat to their autonomy?
So, IMO it starts lifting the entire fear memory into "lability"(by kappa opioid action), the conscious only processes the biggest one, one by one. The mu opioid action clears the fears from the fear component allowing them to settle immediately causing the conscious to focus on the next biggest fear. Many people have described the ibogaine experience as having emotional scenes from past get somehow beautifuly resolved in a rapid matter in front of their eyes so fast that they can't even keep track.
Yes, this happened to me. I would have my eyes closed and suddenly out of nowhere popped an image accompanied with a startle response, like a jumping scene in a horror film. In a flash it was gone. I have gone from being so socially anxious I could not even go for dinner with friends to lecturing in front of 100 people in 6 months – talk about fear extinction
The true fear of the narcissist is himself. I know that know. This is the thing I'm 100% sure.
Yeah. That’s why most proper Narcs I know are scared shitless of even the idea of Ibo (and not because of the physical dangers). My ex reacts almost phobic when you mention it, and he’ll take any other drug ever invented by man. The irony is that if he actually did it, he would be able to meet himself without fear, because Ibo simply shuts down the fear response (similar to MDMA, I think it has sth to do with serotonin).
Not sure if you saw my post in your other Ibo thread about that guy Sebastian Horsley – Ibo actually gave him this gift but he still ###$ it up…
Since then the new alter is probably triggered by any memory associating to the traumatic fear memory. The fear causes the compulsion of the desire to not be that person and causes the switch.
Yes. At the core of DID is the desire not to be a victim. Trouble is,
somebody has to take that job, i.e. there will be one alter who IS the victim. Most DIDers are preoccupied with pushing that alter down and grouping the stronger ones around them so the traumatised alter cannot be further hurt. Sometimes we also split and project, i.e. instead of acknowledging our own victimhood we victimise others. Healing means acknowledging that the victim is a part of you and welcoming him home instead of pushing him away. This is where I find religion comes in handy (even tho I’m an atheist, I like it as a metaphor) – the figure of the crucified Christ is the embodiment of the victim, the beaten, tortured, helpless human body. ‘Accepting Jesus’ for me means embracing this victim part. Once this has happened, healing and thus ‘resurrection’ and salvation can occur.
Is this not the same for Narcissists? Do they not avoid having to embrace their 'bad' self and thus construct a fantasy of omnipotence? I.e. they only want Jesus with the flaming sword, but not Jesus on the cross?
This causes both alters not to remember the event. Remembering the event causes the compulsive switch. The new alter is probably manic as is made out of desire to deny a fear, every second he is "alive" is actually success of being able to pretend to be the new person. The old alter is probably depressed because the subconscious trauma fear inhibits dopamine(depression) unless denied by the alter.
For me it wasn’t quite like that – my ‘manic’ alter was the sum total of everything good about myself that I did not believe I was allowed to be because I’m a useless girl – among them was being successful in a career. The male alter was the one who did our job (being an academic) and he was brilliant at it, I just could not own this brilliance because girls are stupid, so it had to be him. The female alter was depressed because she accepted that she would never amount to anything because she was a flawed woman. Once I accepted I did not have to be a man to do all the good things I wanted to do, the two could merge.
Re trauma tho, there always is one alter who remembers the trauma. They may hide it from the rest of the personality system, but they have the memory. Healing for me was a process of asking alters to come forward and show the trauma they were holding. We (all alters) then thanked them for holding on to this so the rest of us didn’t have to. They made a sacrifice for the good of the whole and acknowledging this was a step in welcoming them back. One often finds in DID that the meanest, most destructive alters hold the most traumatic memories. They literally have taken not one but dozens of bullets so the rest of the system can be happy. Once you give them credit for that they come around like nothing else.
The narcissist however is a similar but different beast. He has millions of alters that flow into each other according to external cues. And none of the alters is the true self, this doesn't exist at all. As desire and fear can play hide and seek with each other this causes the primary narcissistic pattern of self defeat. Intense desire to be something completely hides the fear of consequence of how you will feel after that. If the narc realizes this desire it puts him into a new position, which triggers a different fear-desire personality. This new personality again doesn't like the position and is sorry for getting to the position but can't feel at fault for this since there is no 'self' to be responsible, the new "alter" wouldn't make that decision that the old "alter" did. The new "alter" doesn't feel responsible for what the old "alter" did. There's a new alter every milisecond and it doesn't feel responsible for what the old alter did but it feels the emotions of the moment and since not feeling responsible - the narc must deflect any blame for the how the chain of events got him where he is. He can't see himself to blame because there is no self, it is just a bunch of alters with no true self and they can't blame each other. From this phenomenon the narcissist malice and self-defeat is born. Also the lack of connection, lack of attachment, unattachment to history etc.
This is fascinating. My ex would often show genuine remorse/guilt when he realised he had hurt someone. At the same time he seemed completely incapable of seeing this coming, even if it was glaringly obvious. He once cheated with his best friend’s girlfriend and was really distraught when the friend was pissed off, but somehow he had managed to genuinely not anticipate that this would happen. Your model would explain this.
It ties into what I’ve been thinking about empathy – to me, there are two types of empathy, one immediate (e.g. you see someone crying and immediately feel sad for them) and one I call anticipatory. Anticipatory empathy means having a mental model of other people’s minds that allows one to think: if someone did x to me I would feel bad. Other people feel much the same as me. So if I do x to another person, they will feel bad – then I won’t do x.
In order to perform this mental operation, one has to first and foremost be in touch with one’s own feelings, i.e. one has to know that one hurts when x happens. The Narc seems to fall at this first hurdle – he cannot feel his own pain, and so he is not able to project it onto others to gauge their probable future reactions.
The narcissist doesn't feel attached to his history - his alters did it. He doesn't feel like he every really accomplished anything - his alters did it. He never feels like he is at fault, his alter was at fault.
This can happen in DID too, when a system is very disorganised (“I swear officer, it wasn’t me who didn’t pay her taxes last year, it was last year’s me”
). The difference seems to be that DID alters are in themselves coherent over time, i.e. an alter can come out with months or even years between and they will be still pretty much the same. This is what enables them to form a social structure among each other, a kind of collective consciousness that eventually leads to full integration. In a Narc, according to what you say, there would be an ongoing fragmentation where there are not even continuous alter states, they have always only just come around. They cannot form a collective consciousness because their individual consciousnesses don’t contain enough information for them to be actual entities, they are more like a swarm of nano-bots (forgive the geeking).
I’m curious (if you don’t mind), I read in one of your other posts that you at some point overcame this for a short while – how did you do that? What made you fall back?
It shows an excessive tenderness for the world to remove contradiction from it and then to transfer the contradiction to reason, where it is allowed to remain unresolved.
G.F.W Hegel