How we are

Just wanted to say hi....and give a little update.

Sorry.....We may or may not reply.....being that we're very forgetful lately (It seems we have A LOT of dissociation). We'll try to remember to log back on soon though.

As for us.....we're not doing so good yet. Issues with our T... ended with us not having one now. I feel as if I'm not fully "myself". Very tired. At least the really bad conflicts (from a while back) eased. We just haven't solved all our issues yet.

Feel drained that even more keep showing up. It makes me feel as if I'm losing my mind. Can't believe there are at least 130 of us......I can't fathom that. I feel beyond crazy that I was told (by one of my inner friends) that I haven't even met everyone yet. Many more keep showing up. Not all nice. Not sure how to deal with all the issues. There are tons of them piled up. At least my inner friends are helping a lot. That's cool.

Just feel VERY drained. Can't get a good clear view of the inner world....for some reason (seems to keep happening when troublemakers are around). Just don't know why I feel so bad. It's more "numb" than anything.

Used to write a lot. Haven't wrote for months. Not sure why. As far as I know......we all feel "weird". Not sure how to describe it. We just don't have the "connection" we had before. It felt wonderful before (being around my inner friends). For some reason though....our "connection" seems to have broke. We've been trying to restore it.....to no avail.

Hi Ponyta,

We're glad to see you, and we hope that things get better for you soon.

MDs

Glad to hear you're hanging in there, even with the challenge of a lot of dissociation. I understand the inability to grasp having so many alters. I probably don't need to repeat the wisdom that "you have as many alters as you needed" -- oh wait, I just did.

We're at 76 and have discovered new alters off and on for 8 years, though we're reportedly at or near the end of our search. It's making some sense why it's taken a long time and why there are so many of us. In our case, our parents were abusers, plus some relatives and others. The abuse was widespread and varied and some of us came not to handle abuse but to negotiate moral and other dilemmas.

It's taken a while but there's a clear reason why everyone is here. Part of what enabled knowing was the relatively slow pace of discovering new alters. What has helped us make sense of this many alters was creating first a list of everyone and everything we knew about them, and later, a system map.

We have organized the system map by age and by where the abuse, if any, came from, and that's helped with the overwhelm a lot. Categorizing and grouping us has helped avoiding feeling overwhelmed. We've grouped everyone by age, and by any other mechanism that makes sense. Maybe some of your inside friends can help organize most or all of you in a way that helps you grasp everyone without getting overwhelmed.

Can your friends also help you with all the dissociation? I had to ask for a lot of help early on and most of us were willing to do what we could, if the request was reasonable. A lot of it came down to "guys, I have to be able to function at work, we need food and our home. I can promise you all most of the time outside of work hours."

Hi, sorry to hear your struggling, have no therapist and have more parts than you thought.

I thought I had a few parts, 7. Then Rose woke the twins up. That lead to "remembering" the OL. That's how it felt and then "remembering" "No-one". Then Lilly, one of the parts I knew about sister showed up and I ended up in hospital having called the police and accused my parents of SA.

Since that I have found out I have alot of fragment parts. All child parts. Over 140 fragment parts. While they're not full parts, they are fragments trapped in trauma, it's still alot more than I ever thought. Another part, the OL, has several personna that I get confused and think are parts and also have wondered if some parts are just persona of the overlord or if they all are. Is it all just personna. It gets confusing but they're not all his personna I realised.

I'm not really sure how I'm mentally coping with all this in such a short space of time - about a year really. But generally I accept it.

I accept there's loads of fragments, four or five have been in the body so I can't not accept them. But I don't think about it as a general rule. I know they are there, I accept what parts say about abuse. I accept it and then I focus on now. There's emotions and stuff, parts went missing, couldn't cope. I had to change my whole life because of parts I forgot and because of the overwhelming nature of fragments and the distress that's causing, the distress they are in.

Stabilise the now. Make life livable. It's possible but not easy. With all the parts and fragments I have to have this trust that my system works, that my system has always managed them and me knowing doesn't change it. That's how I stay in the now as much as possible. Then as each thing crops up, a fragment or I notice something I didn't before, I deal with it one thing at a time. One pattern of emotion at a time, one fragment at a time.

It's become not so much about finding the truth, what happened to me, why am I like this, and then having my parents prosecuted - which was the first want. It's become about helping the fragments and dealing with emotional patterns I notice I have and accepting why they are there and then working to change them. To make myself better. I don't care about the abusers. They can't help me, them getting the retribution they deserve can't help me. So I'm working at making myself better, more whole understanding of why I'm like this and being kind to myself and recognising my needs. It's all very selfish but it has to be.

It's hard to know there's things you can't remember, hard to know there's parts of you that you don't know yourself. I find it makes it easier to accept they have always been there and I've made it this far. Small tiny steps having faith in yourself.

Much luck

Ponyta wrote:Just wanted to say hi....and give a little update.

Sorry.....We may or may not reply.....being that we're very forgetful lately (It seems we have A LOT of dissociation). We'll try to remember to log back on soon though.

As for us.....we're not doing so good yet. Issues with our T... ended with us not having one now. I feel as if I'm not fully "myself". Very tired. At least the really bad conflicts (from a while back) eased. We just haven't solved all our issues yet.

Feel drained that even more keep showing up. It makes me feel as if I'm losing my mind. Can't believe there are at least 130 of us......I can't fathom that. I feel beyond crazy that I was told (by one of my inner friends) that I haven't even met everyone yet. Many more keep showing up. Not all nice. Not sure how to deal with all the issues. There are tons of them piled up. At least my inner friends are helping a lot. That's cool.

Just feel VERY drained. Can't get a good clear view of the inner world....for some reason (seems to keep happening when troublemakers are around). Just don't know why I feel so bad. It's more "numb" than anything.

Used to write a lot. Haven't wrote for months. Not sure why. As far as I know......we all feel "weird". Not sure how to describe it. We just don't have the "connection" we had before. It felt wonderful before (being around my inner friends). For some reason though....our "connection" seems to have broke. We've been trying to restore it.....to no avail.

What you wrote made me think of something. In therapy, I had three years psychotherapy about 10 years ago, I would often feel disconnected. The therapist retired and ended the therapy very responsibly so it was a good ending. If yours ended abruptly then it could possibly leave you in this state?

The second thing I thought of was when I had an irresponsible counsellor who didn't use therapeutic boundaries. I just chatted to her basically. One day she had to use therapeutic boundaries and the session was awful, I felt like I was in a bubble sepeeate from the world, highly dissociated and also a bit delusional. This is when I thought therapeutic boundaries do not suit me well. It was one session so I was ok, I just decided that when I step out the door I step out of that bubble and back to myself.

If you've been in therapy a long while with good therapeutic boundaries and then it just stopped I think that could cause disconnect and dissociation - like you're still in that bubble and because it's been a long while you've been in the bubble and not brought out of it slowly, like the really good psychotherapist did, then it's gonna be really hard to get yourself out of, reconnect to yourself and stop dissociating.

I dunno what you do about it but if it is that and you recognise it and get angry that the therapy ending badly did this then may be that'll help.

Thank you all for your replies! We greatly appreciate them!

If yours ended abruptly then it could possibly leave you in this state?

Possible Bad Trigger warning due to things our therapist said that upset us
Well our therapy didn't end so well. We were having a lot of problems. Therapy wasn't helping us with those problems MAINLY because, it's a long story, but, basically our therapist began acting a lot different than when we first met. Our therapist, in our opinion, seemed to have an attitude at times.
We felt as if our therapist was accusing our host and the rest of us for not telling the truth about certain things. Like for example: Our therapist often would ask "why is that person (typically a troublemaker) doing what they are? Like what do they feel? What are they thinking? It's like Well I have no clue. Like I would restate the fact that we aren't the same person inside, despite sharing the same outer body. Our therapist was like "oh come on. you should know. They are part of you." So in other words, our therapist thinks we were lying about not knowing each other's private thoughts.(Facepalm)
It was like our therapist completely changed their tone to us. Our therapist seemed to get less understanding, that and a bunch of other things that's been adding up. So basically our therapy ended abruptly and at a very bad time, BUT we all agreed that would couldn't keep going there. It made us feel WORSE with every visit. We were happy to get away from there, BUT now we have the problem of not having any therapist. Although, we feel no therapist is better than what we were dealing with from going there.