There are many strands that make up rope. Yesterday when driving in my car I saw the many individual strands of memory that make up several of my team. This has never happened before. It was overwhelming. I stopped the car. I wanted to be sick. Sean, Alex, Annie, Little Mie, Alison. I could see them all entirely separate but coiled together and in my minds eye I was being presented with a length of rope. As an individual I cannot cope with what these guys have been through but do know that they all make up me or indeed we make up us and that many threads are stronger than one. I am being told something I am being told of the strength in numbers. The positive shows me strength. I do not feel strong. The bad voice tells me rope can take the weight of a human being. How do we turn this rope into something useful and not something with which to hang ourselves. There are plenty of better uses for rope. We will find one.

Just realised something else. I watch too many series on Netflix. Sometimes it feels like that the characters become part of my life. I wonder what is happening to them and when I am with other people I want to say 'do you know such and such' but it is a character out of a series. Like I know it isn't real but on some level have really taken these guys on board. Today when I was sitting watching something I thought I was sitting in a house similar to the one on the screen and it was quite a shock when I looked around and realised I was 'back' in my tiny house. Don't think this is anything to do with dissociation but it is a bit weird. Wish I could find some interests that I could stick to. I used to do things, lots of things but not anymore. Just nothing seems permanent enough to engage in anymore. I think that everything fractured too quickly last year, we really are struggling to put ourselves back together again. Sometimes it feels that unless there is someone else around then I don't exist. The thought of existing i.e. mixing with others provokes anxiety - someone always clicks in but it is exhausting - have clicked out on a couple of occasions in public recently and keep getting an overwhelming urge to run. This is not good because the last time that happened we ended up in A and E - we didn't run externally - we ran internally - none responsive on the outside - unable to speak at all like looking at the world through triple glazing. Don't think it will come to that. It is the not knowing that is the issue. I keep asking - are we ok - nothing back - can't see the internal world at the moment. Except for Little Mie and Annie. We asked Mie to draw a picture - she drew a self portrait with Little Annie and a Teddy. Seeing Little Annie was a shock, she is quite disturbing and triggering something. Little Mie was standing under a rain cloud and it was raining hard. There was sun though on the other side of the cloud. That is Mie all over. She always finds something or sees something to be cheerful about. Things are messy. Think there might be things going on I don't know about. I am sleeping really hard like black out but waking up feeling like I haven't been asleep at all.

Today this seemed really obvious. Walking to Sainsburys. There is a little girl that was really cute and really submissive who used to help us survive all sorts of mess. Now we are an adult body and we are faced with any sort of threat we still use the same way to survive. It makes it really hard to exist in an adult world and means we cannot stand up for ourselves in an adult way. If we want to be more settled we need to take some pressure off the Littles so we have to relearn how to do that. Think that was what our last T was doing when he talked about 'distress tolerance'. Little Mie used to turn up quite a bit and he used to pressure her a little till someone else bailed her out. Sounds bad but Little Mie actually really liked him because he was helping. He was also quite funny. We are a lot more fragile at the moment than we have been. SO was up at the weekend which meant M could have a bit of an offload and W was around a bit this morning. We have a picture that Little Mie drew but on the whole things are just blurry. Reminds me of a song 'my name is blurry face and I care what you think' 21 pilots. I am pretty sure the lead singer is a multiple.

Now I am going out more I am sick and tired of people asking me 'What have I been up to?' 'What did you do at the weekend?' ask me forward I have a better shot at it.

I am sick and tired of the circle of 'I am fine, can't see what all the problems are?' and then finding evidence to the contrary.

I am sick and tired of walking along on what I think and feel is solid ground to find I put my food down and have suddenly sunk up to my waist in c***p.

I am sick and tired of the unexpected shards and splinters of colours, pictures and feelings breaking through at the most inconvenient times to be glimpsed and then gone.

I am thankful that after everything we are still here and give credit to all for still fighting for us.

W

Today
I can say this. The dreams have been odd. Not nightmares just dreams. There were some wounds and peeled the dressing of to see that there had been a lot of healing. Then I was at some conference about dissociation to which I had invited my daughters, the brother and sisters and was in a panic because none of them are aware of our situation. The mother was also present but we couldn’t see her she was like a great dark shadow. Then we wake and we have this. It relates to the meltdown the night before and some things are starting to make sense. Not easy sense but sense none the less.

***Trigger Warning**** This thing is like a house with rotten floorboards, some call it the rabbit hole. I never understood that. Could never work out what that meant. It is the falling through and down and down with peculiar things moving past that don’t appear to make much sense. This was Saturday. We hadn’t wanted to go. Being told not to isolate self is a good thing. We know that speaking with people outside of ourselves is a good thing. So we knew we would go when we were invited to a house for food on Saturday. We still not allowed to use names but two of us really did not want to go. It was more than the usual ‘can’t be bothered’ it was borne out of fear; a trigger unrecognized by the adults in our party and acquiesced by the younger members because ‘we always have to be nice’. It is so wrong it is so wrong. We are not allowed to upset people by saying no. The teens made a plan of how to cope. But this is the truth and it hurts like hell to unpick this trigger. At this house people would be drinking. The little’s are frightened of the lady who owns the house. She likes people to stay up very late she wants us to stay over and makes plans to do things the next day. None of us wants to do those things but we lack the ability to say no. I shall be very clear here. This lady is no danger to the physical body in the present. No bad things are going to happen if we stay at this ladies house but now with hindsight we can see the layers of wobbling floorboards stacking up. We went we stayed. The woman sat till 3.30am and we wanted to go to bed. She was listening to music. One more song she kept saying one more song and we couldn’t leave. We got up early. The doors were locked; we had to search for a key to let ourselves out. *****End Trigger****

We are home and in the shower and all the pieces we have been trying to hold together for the last 24 hours go through the floorboards and we are falling, and falling and there is debris all over the place and we know that we are hurt.

And this is what we have learned. We do not know were much of this debris comes from or how it fits back together again but much of that does not matter it is dead wood. The endless questioning of what, where, when is futile. What does matter is that know that we are hurt. If you do not know that you are hurt then you cannot fix yourself. This is huge because we can now see the damage and the lack of care and that means we can share some of the pain so that maybe some of us do not feel like damaging the body? I don’t know for sure but can definitely feel a shift. We need some quiet time.