Some questions

I can relate to most of what everyone says in this thread including Lilyfairy...for me i know its very hard to talk about these things because i suppressed it for so long. Not much real life support at all, and even here i feel super vulnerable. I dont have this problem about anything else, but i feel ''blocked'' regarding DID and alters. And i dont allow myself to be vulnerable very often.

Hugs to everyone.

Lindi - had to look up the word persona as its not a word I use often if at all. Parts of me like it because it shows how you can be different within one person, and also like you said it could mean we're making it up (but to us it feels like that sometimes). Go with whatever feels right for you and whatever you can agree on (that itself can be really hard)

Im-pure wrote:And i dont allow myself to be vulnerable very often.

This, exactly. Maybe dissociation is even a way to avoid vulnerability (at least I think it is for me), so it would make sense to feel unusually vulnerable about it Hugs (if you like )!

And thank you so much for looking it up, debetoile - you shouldn't have had to, I just thought that you maybe already knew the term! But I appreciate it a lot! Greetings to everyone of you

lindi wrote:I don't know why I felt like writing this as a reply to you, 'cause (disclaimer!) this is really about me

That's ok- you're explaining how you understand. Thanks for sharing.

debetoile wrote:Lilyfairy - well done for posting here, we get how you're just not allowed to say something which can be frustrating, but you managed it eventually.

We have parts that go away, sometimes for months on end. Sometimes it feels like everyone has gone and left 'me' all alone. But they always come back, not always when I need them, but eventually I'm no longer alone again.

Thankyou. I still don't quite understand why the block to talking about parts is there, but I suppose there's a reason for it. There's some guesses I can make. I think everything going quiet just contributes to my dismissing it as not being real/not having happened/all in my head.

Im-pure wrote:I can relate to most of what everyone says in this thread including Lilyfairy...for me i know its very hard to talk about these things because i suppressed it for so long. Not much real life support at all, and even here i feel super vulnerable. I dont have this problem about anything else, but i feel ''blocked'' regarding DID and alters. And i dont allow myself to be vulnerable very often.

Hugs to everyone.

Allowing yourself to be vulnerable is really hard to do. Especially when you've learned to push things aside so much.

Hi, Lily. So much about what you've written is so familiar, just how things worked for me -- for decades -- until I was at the end of all options as to why my life was so off, why I had periodic debilitating depressions, why I had always had some inkling that I was more than one, and what to do about a few strong pieces of evidence that I was.

Many times I wanted to talk with a friend or think about, mostly in my own internal thought, some weird event, phenomenon or memory. Looking into potential abuse, wondering why something didn't fit, wondering about missing pieces (which I now know was lost time), any of this would trigger a mental process that was as a sense that a wall or walls were going up, followed by a slow but relentless whirlwind of fog whipping through my mind, taking my awareness I had just had and the focus on a potential problem with it. That's how the block happened for me.

Many, many times I would have the experience: "no, not the fog, stop, wait, what was I thinking about, dang it, not again, why does this happen, crap, what is going on, oh what was I thinking about, it was something important, I think it was, what just happened, oh, #*$&, why does this keep happening to me?" That's how it went. For years I had only the vaguest recollection that this was even a pattern. So I never really got to the point of bringing this up with a therapist. In that, you're ahead of where I was.

As Debetoile said, bravo for overcoming this hurdle and posting! I've gone through periods where some or all alters are simply not communicating, it's terrifying, but then I recall times when they were out doing things and I can reassure myself, yeah, that was an alter, I can't walk that way or reproduce that guy's grammar, I could never sit through two hours of Winnie the Pooh, I'm multiple. If someone doesn't front now, almost daily, I become suicidal within a day or two. I need the parts of myself, we all do.

For years I avoided thinking it was really possible or likely that I was multiple because "multiplicity is just really crazy so I do not want that to be what's wrong with me." Like what I wanted made any difference in the end. Ironically, it's far less crazy than I thought. But after decades of pain and never, ever being able to figure out what was wrong, I decided I just finally had to look into whether DID was underlying everything. And obviously, that's what I discovered. Still it took me months and months of reading about it, biographies and articles, to accept the possibility, and later, to allow the others to surface.

A large part of our inability to overcome blocks to understanding was our gatekeeper. Blocking is often one or more alter's specific job. To disable blocking, you probably need to communicate with that specific part of you all. Our Sphinx generated the whirlwind that took the focus away. Once I got to the point where I was the slightest bit open to the possibility, I had to speak the words "if this is what it is, I want to know, I'm scared but I think I'm ready, I need to know, please, please, please don't block me anymore, it's not fair, please let me understand, it's safe now." I literally had to say that out loud for my system, for the other alters, to understand that I was serious. And I had to repeat it to reinforce that commitment.

All my other suspicions, all the issues I focused on were ultimately "not it." I could have delved forever into my depressions, my confused sexuality, my patterns of avoidance, resignation and hopelessness, and all the rest with no eventual success because all of these were by-products of the abuse I suffered unfairly and the DID I developed to cope with that abuse. My therapists and I were treating the symptoms, not the root cause.

We hope you stick around here and keep reading and that you post as often as you're able.

Our first post here, when I read it back, sounds like we were delusional (to me anyway.. rereading it I just see that a lot of the info we gave about ourselves was erroneous) or something. We were so confused and so many of us wanted to know, wanted to be aware of each other, but some were deeply afraid because their whole reason to be was to hide our multiplicity from ourselves.
Mal posted our text unfinished because he knew some others were already grappling for the front to close the browser window.

Soon after we told our suspicion that we might be multiple to a close friend. That was a long time coming. But once that was done the blocking lessened a lot because somehow, now that somebody had been tasked with reminding us should we forget, there was no point in forgetting anymore.

Johnny-Jack wrote: Once I got to the point where I was the slightest bit open to the possibility, I had to speak the words "if this is what it is, I want to know, I'm scared but I think I'm ready, I need to know, please, please, please don't block me anymore, it's not fair, please let me understand, it's safe now." I literally had to say that out loud for my system, for the other alters, to understand that I was serious. And I had to repeat it to reinforce that commitment.

Oh man. That.
For a long, long time too.

Thanks Johnny-Jack and Teatime. I really appreciate people answering. What you've said is helpful and reassuring.

Johnny-Jack wrote:A large part of our inability to overcome blocks to understanding was our gatekeeper. Blocking is often one or more alter's specific job. To disable blocking, you probably need to communicate with that specific part of you all. Our Sphinx generated the whirlwind that took the focus away. Once I got to the point where I was the slightest bit open to the possibility, I had to speak the words "if this is what it is, I want to know, I'm scared but I think I'm ready, I need to know, please, please, please don't block me anymore, it's not fair, please let me understand, it's safe now." I literally had to say that out loud for my system, for the other alters, to understand that I was serious. And I had to repeat it to reinforce that commitment.

Thankyou- this really helps and sounds like something I need to look at trying.

JohnnyJack wrote:We hope you stick around here and keep reading and that you post as often as you're able.

Thanks. I think so far I've done quite well. Usually when I have started discussing dissociative issues elsewhere on the forum, I've ended up closing up for days afterwards and avoided threads where I've spoken about it, so I've made a step forward I think.

Yes, that sounds really positive!