Suicidal thoughts **obvious trigger warning**

It's nice to meet you, Sagefusion. Thank you for sharing part of your story. We appreciate your good intentions, although it appears that our system operates differently from yours.

We are a non-host system and have known about our multiplicity for 19 years. We view our system as a collective of 47 persons and do not use terms such as "alters" and "parts." Our system is governed and operated by committee.

When anyone in the system struggles, we do our best to support each other. When someone in a position of responsibility struggles, especially on an ongoing basis, we have a greater challenge.

We will always be who we are. We agree that healing takes time and is best approached gradually. But when the pain becomes unbearable and stays unbearable, we know that we need to resist the temptation to isolate. Reaching out for help is difficult for us, but we know that we need to do so.

Mary, Allegra, and others

Today, on behalf of our entire system, I wrote and signed a safety contract. It was completely my idea. If someone else in our system or someone on the outside had decided that we should do it, I would not have agreed.

We will be giving the contract to our T the next time that we see her.

We've posted the content of the contract on our blog, linked in our signature below.

Charity

Well done charity for taking control of the situation for you all. Sounds like a big leap in the right direction.

This is great, Charity and MDs!

Things born from inside are very powerful.

I join to celebrate in happiness with you.

Sea

Thank you, Jolly Jo and Sea. It helped me to commit to the contract. I know that it will not make things all better, but it helps to know that I can make a positive, empowering choice.

Charity

I think what leads to me having suicidal thoughts is me letting stuff that happened in the past bring me down. I think once I can let go of the past, I'll be a much happier person.

Positive update here:

dissociative-identity/topic109881-1370.html#p1771400

MDs

hey all. I wanted to post here or in Johnny-Jack's other thread about knowing or not knowing certain alters are fronting and I am tying these two threads/thoughts together with admittedly not much clarity. So I'm stumbling it out here.

We have had a real challenge with the suicidal thoughts over the past weeks. We know it is bad when we start making actual plans. We know we have depressive parts with suicidal ideation but it seems contagious, that we have all given up. Or have we? could it be parts presenting or more at the surface (the topic of the other thread) that we, or at least I, am not that aware of? And does it matter. I guess it does in that are we a suicidal whole or is a suicidal part triggered, or upset or what.

i haven't seen my T in a bit but saw him today and didn't feel the attachment or usefulness of therapy.

I cut out family members that were abusive or toxic. When I cut my mom out of my life, it was like the last straw and since then I haven't had really any suicidal feelings.

I am also curious how many of you had to do this before being able to heal. did you ever feel they "werent that bad"

SamsLand said:

I am also curious how many of you had to do this before being able to heal. did you ever feel they "werent that bad"

The only two relatives that we cut out of our life were our maternal grandmother and our uncle (mother's brother). Both of them are dead now.

Cutting them out prevented them from taking a present-day role in our life, but it did not remove the impact that they still had on us from the past. It will take many years to resolve those feelings.

We never felt that specific people in our life "weren't that bad," but we did (and still do) feel that the abuse itself wasn't that bad. No RA/MC, no SA or physical abuse in the immediate family. We know that it does no good to compare, but our feelings are what they are.

MDs

For at least two decades I thought that the abuse "wasn't that bad." But the reason I thought that was that I didn't know about 99.9% of it. I myself didn't recall virtually any of it because I have DID and that's how DID works. Now that I have so many flashes of what happened -- visuals, physical sensations, emotions, sounds, narratives, etc. -- I do know and accept it was that bad. But without these details, and the willingness to know the worst, I would still be in some denial, I think.

I italicized willingness to know because I find this is still a challenge for me with each new alter, who generally hold a new type of abuse. Literally dozens of times I've thought "well, at least I know it can't get worse" and there's probably some temporary relief in believing that. And yet it does get worse. Maybe not worse but at least equally devastating emotionally.

*** trigger warning *** I remembered my mother strangled and drowned me, before I remembered she tried to both lure and push me into traffic, before I remembered she sexually abused me.
*** end trigger warning ***

I'm not really sure there's a progression of severity. Each set of abuse events was held by a specific alter and we learned about the alter along with the memory of the abuses. Each has had to be dealt with separately and I'm not sure I'm healed fully from any yet.

This is how my DID and my system works because it's how it happened for me. It's worth stating here that everyone's story and system are different. My childhood, fortunately I guess, had a lot of normal and positive parenting and other caregiving.

I don't think it was the specific categories of abuse that so handicapped us, it was the severity and frequency of the abuse along with the complete absence of any way for me to deal with the emotional chaos generated during the trauma. The parents and others didn't remember or certainly never acknowledged or apologized for anything they did, except for my mother, barely, just before she died.

For reference, the post SamsLand mentions is Other alters aren't fronting...are you sure?

You know, "it wasn't that bad" phrase deserves it's own thread or billboard. It blinds many of us with DID. If I ever write a book about my life, it would deserve a solid chapter of discussion.