[life journey thread]Tales from the WorldTree

Hi ArbreMonde,

That's a lot a realizations to be dealing with. I hope you can do some self-care.

Good news about the workman!

--the Gang

TheGangsAllHere wrote:Hi ArbreMonde,

That's a lot a realizations to be dealing with. I hope you can do some self-care.

Good news about the workman!

--the Gang

We agree! Congrats, ArbreMonde folks!

MDs

This is a repost to keep track of things all in one place.

Lust in another topic wrote:♥ One of the relationship I/we have been trapped in, involved a guy who pretended to "help" us and "heal" us and "save" us.


***************************TW : abuses of all sorts*************************











♥ All he did was: manipulate us - especially me, triggering me into fronting - into behaving the way he thought would mean "healing". Refusing to allow us to express our "bad" emotions (such as, being angry at our past abusers, beind depressed because of the trauma, being stressed because of autistic overload), to engage into "bad" activities (liking Pokémon games, liking Tamagotchi ((he even searched our bag for our Tamagotchi and "confiscated" it until the battery died)), liking "true crime" shows ((he would yell at us for watching them)), liking unicorns ((he even had us throw away some of our unicorn plushies)) etc.), to have difficulties engaging into "adult activities" (driving is hellish because of autistic overloads, cooking is difficult because of dyspraxia and lack of parental teaching into cooking, a lot of us don't like to have sex ((which lead to him raping us almost on a daily basis while making us feel guilty for "forcing him to rape us")) ).

♥ He was angry that we needed an outside therapist and would calculate our respective shares of participating into the paying of rent, food etc. without accounting for the therapist payments, meaning that we could never buy ourselves nice things because we were out of money at the end of the months - making us dependend on him and his willingness to give us presents, in order to have clothes or shoes or furnitures or paying the cat's vet bill.

♥ Each time we showed signs of not being perfectly 200% happy about being with him, he would be abusive in all sorts of way, including guilt-tripping us for feeling bad or having trauma. He sometimes became physically violent if we reminded him of our past traumas. He abused us when we made our transgender coming-out.

♥ But when talking with people outside of the relationship, his point of view always was (and I'm sure it still is) that he was doing his best to help me/us get better, and I/we were abusively unwilling to get better and abusively refusing sex to him and abusively making him pay for our clothes. He also "punished" us for seeing his car had a flat, by making us pay for the tire replacement, as if noticing the flat was the same thing as creating the flat.

♥ He went as far as keeping our meds away from us because "if you keep taking them you'll become addicted" or "if you take more than 3 meds per day it means you're just as sick as having AIDS and obviously you are NOT as sick as AIDS therefore you have to pick 2 of the 3 but you cannot take all 3" (he included "vitamin supplements" and "painkillers when the periods are so bad I'm waking up in the middle of the night crying out of pain" in the "3 pills a day" count).












********************END TW************************************************

& Not doing okay lately. The volunteer T at the social centre, who we thought would give us hints on who in our area can give DID treatment, disappointed us.

& We had a list of all our DID symptoms, written by 3 of us with 3 different writings. For him these are "just symptoms" and he refuses to hint towards a diagnosis because "diagnosis trap people in a sickness" and he refuses to hint towards non-analysts because "behavioral therapies brainwash people into a fake normal" and "does not heal long term".

& That, plus the central heater not working while the temps are freezing outside, and we are exhausted all the time, and get cramps, and bad eating behaviors, and we cannot keep up with cleaning the house, and I don't know where we can find a medic to fill in the papers for the disability center. I mean, the social centre volunteer T cannot do it, and our medic-T just fills in the paper as if we were fully able - despite us repeating that "No, this is difficult to do, this we cannot..." she just crosses straight A's everywhere. No wonder the disability centre took money from us. As to now, it's been one year struggling to try to get our money back. It's getting old.

& We're tired of explicitely asking for help and having the "T" in front of us just go "Hum, interesting... No, I do not do that, this is bad therapy, you know?"

& It's disappointing. We're feeling desperate right now.

__
Urielle

-- We had a lot of breakthroughs and things like that lately but... Every time we want to write them down, we dissociate and forget them. It is so frustrating!

-- On the happy sides, we solved the VPN/streaming issue by switching browser. We own a kilt now and it's just the BEST. CLOTHING. ITEM. EVEEEER!!! It's warm, allows for freedom of movement, is masc enough for the guys, fem enough for the girl, queer enough for the embies. We also have an appointment to design the kitchen (after a whole year of camping in our own appartment xD) and in two months, it'll be there, settled, and we'll start doing the walls too! Then the only thing left to do will be dealing with the insurance about the damages from the workman. And finishing to re-do the big piece of furniture so that we can finally open the last half of the boxes from moving in. With the dissociation and AD(H)D we're going to open them like it's Xmas and be surprised by what we own xD

-- . . . Okay I wanted to write more but my brain went away and 3 hours have passed... Something about mental health, dealing with trauma, I HAD it right there! But it's gone. Again. It's like all I can focus on is "I have a kilt it looks so good it looks so queer and it's trans-friendly because the traditional answer to What do you have under your kilt? is Legs and socks!"

-- We dissociate a lot during sleep too, lots of sleep avoidance, then we cannot get up in the morning and sleep until noon... And are so tired all day long, and slip in bed circa 7 or 8 PM, and stay here reading and stuff and avoiding sleep for hours... It's so annoying.

-- Also found fragments that surface for short instants now and then, they identify with the gender assigned at birth and even with the deadname, it's very uncomfortable. Feels like the whole trans thing is illegitimate... That transitionning is a mistake... But it feels so good to transition! It cannot be fake if it feels so good!

-- Still looking for a T that knows DID. Been searching nation-wide. The T that know about DID and have the knowledge to diagnose DID are very few, most of them are in the capital city, none is reachable for us. Others T refuse to take DID patients because they dont have DID knowledge. It's just... are we a forking joke? In our country, most Ts think that DID is not real anyway... Good thing we are mostly functional because otherwise we sould be "treated" for something else than DID like psychosis or bipolar... which is very bad to recieve meds that are for another condition than the one we have. It delays healing and can cause even worse damages than trauma did.

-- This is exhausting. Nobody wants to take a DID person in, even the many trauma specialists in my town refuse to touch DID with a 6 feet pole! Okay, better to say "No sorry" than to try to take care of something you have no knowledge of, but still... It's like DID does not exist in my country. Yet again, most docs also think autism does not exist and dont want to hear anything about it sooo... *shrug* I guess the problem is the history of mental health care in my country and its focus on psychoanalysis and Freud and Lacan like nothing else matters. A T we contacted even told us right into our nose that neurosciences dont exist and that "symptoms are just symptoms" and that it's impossible to know what a symptom means and how the brain works. Made me want to shove into his nose the many medical papers about the link between a shrunk hyppocampus and trauma and dissociation.

-- But, no. Apparently the DID symptoms are "just symptoms" and it's impossible to link them with past trauma or any brain scan or even DID. What a pile of bullshirt.

-- We have a lot of sleep avoidance and it makes us so exhausted... We dissociate when we avoid sleep, found new game apps on the phone, games that we used to play when younger (such as Spider Solitaire or Klondike) and it's linked with feelings of having the gender and name of when younger so, maybe trauma fragments are coming to the surface? And since sleeping was dangerous when we were younger, they dont want to sleep.

-- We need to find something to deal with them. To help them sleep or at least feel safe at night. Maybe just get up, get dressed, do something active (brew some soothing herbal tea or hot cocoa, read new books that we did not know existed when we were young), turn on the lights, see that it's here and now instead of there and then.

-- Took me the whole day to write this post... I'm tired of being exhausted. We need to solve the sleep avoidance issue once and for all.

__
Zami

We are dealing with a new ANP (me). Another fictive. It appears that most if not all of the positive "persons" around us are fictional characters, leading to an almost exclusively fictive system (to the exception of the pack of emotional animal alters, glued together in the form of the sub-system Zami).

As time passes, we understand better and better the different roles we have in the system. What we actually do is not always what we want to do, which is a bit confusing sometimes.

Some of the "past selves" also start to emerge as (one?) differenciated individual(s). It is uncomfortable to "be" the "past me" again sometimes. We struggle to allow these parts full autonomy, a name in our journal, or simply, a voice somewhere in the journal, on the forums or in conversations with friends. But they get close and closer to the consciousness, making us mis-write the current year as 1996 or 1997 for example.

We need more time to allow ourselves to "be" the "past" again, and bring the "past" into the "present". Especially because it feels like the whole transition thing is "fake" if we sometimes be "pre-transition-us". Yet the system as a whole feels way better with the transition, which rules out the "fake" hypothesis. I guess it is the same as with DID denial: it is difficult to face a complicated situation.

We still struggle with everyday chores (the appartment still a work in progress, it's been a year so far...) but, they become better. We found a way to mute notifications on the phone during the sleeping hours, which means that our cat does not have the fake impressions that it's wake-up time many times a night, which means that he less often comes to wake us up to request cuddles, which means that we have a better quality of sleep and are less tired.

With a friend, we run some numbers about the therapists in our country. It turns out there is way, way, not enough therapists in our country for all the DID people there are. Even if we take the lowest estimation of 1% people with DID in our country. Therefore, it is not our fault if we do not find any DID therapist in our area. It is because there are not enough therapists in our country. Even if we take all of the therapists there are and not only the ones who have the minimum of knowledge about DID (which is, EMDR for DID people; I am not even talking about the ones who can diagnose DID, there are even fewer of those).

We did all we could. Now what is left for us is to read "The haunted self" and other professional books about DID, dissociation, therapy, as well as read books about art-therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and other similar tools - and do it ourselves. It will be better than nothing. It will take time (our to be read mountain is getting bigger not smaller...) but we will get here.

In the meantime, I salute you.

__
Aragorn

I have had a difficult 5 years. I felt 'buried alive' by the depression and many alters appearing, triggered I suspect by onset of menopause.

I found writing as if I was writing my own autobiography helped me to get things in order. Looking at old photo's I could see who was there and when/what age although the first 7 years (of my life) are still missing.

It's helped me return to reclaim my body. The others are still in there but they have settled down, some have merged/blended, some have disappeared back into the inner world. It has been unanimously decided to remain 'covert' in the outside world. No-one IRL knows and only a few even know I have autism. I'm happy thats 'close enough' I don't think mine is full DID. I don't think I'd get that diagnosis. I think its possibly more an OSDD thats heavily influenced & impacted by the limits of my autism.

I wish you luck in your quest,

Kit

Thank you for your support, Kit.

Well, the difference between DID and OSDD 1b can be subtle especially when the DID becomes functional and the amnesia between alters disappears. In both cases, the therapy tools are the same therefore, I am not sure it is that important to know which is which exactly. But I also understand it can be important for some people to know the exact label they fit in.

The thing you suggest with the pictures cannot be done for us since we do not own any picture prior to a few years ago (we lost a hard drive). But we will follow your advice on taking it slow, writing things down and reclaiming the body.

The gender transition, weight loss, muscle gain... Helped us a lot reclaiming the body. We will keep heading in that direction in order to lower the present-day dissociation/depersonnalisation. As for the childhood fragments... the best course of action is to re-parent them once we got used to feeling them around. Allow them to be while feeling safe here and now.

It is uncomfortable. But pushing them away will only hurt the whole of us in the long run.

Once again, thank you for your support.

__
Aragorn & David.

A few updates. (I almost started writing in french. Oopsie.)

Pride had decided that Easter would be his birthday. It was all fun and games until tragedy happened.

The first tragedies were with the groceries. We ask them to be delivered either to our door or at the drive-in, in order to avoid the fatigue from going inside the store (light, sounds, people... are exhausting for us). But sometimes there are tiny mistakes or product swaps when one is out of stock.

Which leads to Pride's Easter chocolates.

They were swapped due to the out-of-stock panick at the store. Which was tragedy number one, and two (we re-ordered groceries and therefore re-ordered chocolates hoping to get all the right ones this time).

Tragedy number two happened when the surprise eggs, who announced on the box that all three of them would contain a unicorn-themed surprise, ended up with one unicorn and two fairies.

This is where Pride snapped. The whole of it was too much for him to handle. His emotions were strong and violent, and started to trigger a binge eating episode. But with the help of friends through chat, and Lust on the inside, he managed to express and vent his emotions and frustration and pain in a healthier way.

This whole episode helped us understand why we tend to binge on some foods and not others. When the foods are linked to an even that is emotionally painful, we tend to binge on them (or alternatively, to want to throw them all to the garbage) in order to make them disappear - and the painful event and emotions with them. But not this time. This time we sat with Pride through his pain and sadness and frustration, encouraged him to talk to our friends about it all, and Lust held him in her arms to comfort him. It was uncomfortable to experience the painful emotions with him, but, it was way healthier than eating all the Easter chocolates - and way less painful than we feared it to be.

All in all, it was a small victory for the whole system.

***
We also have un-earthed a sub-system or cluster of old host fragments. It is not new but we are managing our overall emotions as best as we can to allow them some space.

We call them the G/Hosts. One of them thinks that the nickname Sadie would be a nice fit, because of the Steven Universe series (the character Sadie sings a song about being a ghost in the last season). Both names allow us to refer to them without using the body's deadname.

In the past, we used to think that Zami was the host. It turns out, Zami is more of a protector/persecutor, and would switch with the G/Hosts often. Zami's protection was so needed due to the constant stress we were under, that the G/Hosts were small fragments almost undistinguichable from them. It might be that the G/Hosts were the absent-minded, dissociated part of us back then, and Zami, the emotional, stressed-out, hyper-vigilent one.

Just like ghosts from the past, the G/Hosts are trapped in different time periods, each at a different age, ready to hide behind Zami, to use Zami as a shield for protection.

It makes us wonder how the reste of the system came to be, or why. An hypothesis would be: introjections of more "balanced" charaters/people in order to be able to really function everyday instead of being in this constant state of hide-behind-the-qilin's-scales-at--the-first-sign-of-potential-trigger. The creation of abilities and states that are more bearable to "be" for the everyday life.

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Aragorn and David