Alcohol creating a conduit?

KudzuVines wrote:I was afraid it meant I was getting worse, more "florid" it whatever.

Well, it is more florid. But that's okay; florid is not necessarily bad. In this case it is good. In fact, often florid is good because it leads to correct diagnosis, treatment, and other good stuff.

Top priority isn't to appear normal, but to feel and be well. Well means functional, happy, thriving. Passing for normal doesn't count for much if it is at the expense of your full aliveness because parts of you are locked away, suppressed, hidden.

Be well!

I remembered coming across this post a while back and never got around to checking it out though it seemed relevant.

Sometime around 2007 or so, when I started to suspect I had alters (or at the time maybe schizophrenia) I had noticed that when I would go to the bar and sit down for a drink I could have a conversation with someone, I'm thinking it was Shephard, in my head. I remember this was the superbowl...Patriots lost their only game of the season and it freaked me the f*** out that I was somehow very calmly conversing with a person in my head about dark and horrible topics, unresolved resentments, listening to him harp at me about how I was wasting potential in my life, letting people screw us over and that eventually I would break and others would take over (I didn't know how to respond to these comments).

These incidents happened before I had gotten severely inebriated / incapacitated. So I can sort of recall them.

Up until the last year I had been a person who had been aware of others to some degree but never lost my whole sense of self until certain life events recently. I was (and still am at least when I am fronting) a very inhibited person concerning aspects of myself I did not like, namely parts I felt to be spiteful, vengeful and manipulative, and especially in the past when I would drink would find some of them coming out to play. There were times when friends would tell me that I literally became another person, not just like "oh you did something messed up," like another person altogether. This was a period in my life where I encouraged others to physically harm me for fun, cut, burned myself etc and carried a lot of shame and embarrassment over it. For our system I tended to inhibit (and still try to especially more lately for everyone's sake) the others but as is evident now we are not always coconscious / fronting anymore. Alcohol eliminates inhibition and if you tend to cofront then usually you or others are in a sense inhibiting or "checking" other members of the system. No inhibition means the most ambitious among you won't be deterred much if they lack the capacity to moderate each other. -Andrew

Altered states takes on a new meaning when it comes to substance abuse and DID. -Shephard