Hi, and my journey thread

feeling a bit sad at the moment, though no real reason why. I am trying to think beautiful happy thoughts though, like a bowl slowly filling with beautiful roses. i do that sort of thing sometimes, cause i think it's important that happiness has to come from within, but it can be hard too. but i am trying.
also therapy has been really hard. I feel the therapist though nice has been asking me questions and they are hard to answer always. i told him i think i have did last session, so my plan of not bringing that up is foiled, but so far is okay with continuing treating me. though i am nervous still, but we'll see.
so yeah.. just thinking about the bowl and it filling with roses, and maybe have to think of another one soon. I also have a cute fictive that has been around lately sweetly smiling at me and that has been nice.

Oh i had a really weird car dream the other day. the dream was long so i wont get into it all but there was a part where i was in a car but i couldn't see anything, not the pedal or the wheel and i was driving anyways, barely could keep up with seeing the road, would get sleepy and miss things., the breaks didn't work, and the car was driving super slowly..but again breaks did nothing, would not speed up if i pressed on the gas. I was out of the car at one point trying to pull on it to stop it didn't work and then i had to leap back in and find the wheel and all that all over again. it was so awkward and i was terrified it would crash or people would just be annoyed at me for being behind me that i thought about crashing on the side just to get out of people's way.. such an awkward dream.

Your dream makes me think about how it can feel to "drive the body" when one has DID and does not have access to the full control, nor any access to the full informations of everything from the outside world.

But it gets better with time. I promise.

Thank you so much. <3

my therapist is accepting that i likely have Did, which is pretty cool. and we are going on from there. makes things much easier, and am really glad this is the case.
been foggy a lot lately, and in general just been super tired, but am slowly relaxing from some stressful situations.

one thing that i guess i dont know how i feel is that the therapist is suggesting edmr and i tried reading about it, but i just don't know what to think on it at the moment. i am nervous about losing my disassociative fog, because through it, i feel alters sometimes come and sit with me when i feel lonely. would that stop? cause that really helps me. idk. i will try and read more about it soon.

EMDR is only about healing trauma. Doing it when you are dissociative is very very tricky. If you are not stable enough and if your therapist does not know how to adapt EMDR for dissociation, it is a bad idea to engage into EMDR. Been there, done that, re-dissociated and got additional re-traumatization. (OK granted neither me nor the therapist were aware that my dissociation was so bad it ranged more into the DID side of the Force rather than the PTSD one)

EMDR alone, healing trauma alone, will NOT force any integration and even less, force any fusion between alters.

Do not hesitate to go back to the ISSTD therapy guideline and other ressource books/documents from the "DID ressources" thread I linked in my signature coz I'm lazy to fish it out each time. "Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors" is a nice one to read, shorter than the Haunted Self, easier to read, and more focused around what can be seen in therapy rather than being focused around general theory.

Recently I've also been discussing integration and fusion with Yuna in this thread dissociative-identity/topic220817.html I guess it'll answer some of your other questions.

If you read french, "Psychothérapie de la dissociation et du trauma" is a catalog of therapies around trauma and dissociation. I haven't found it in english and I think it's a shame because it presents a lot of different tools which better helps understanding them, how to adapt them to DID and other complex dissociative disorders, and it's a nice way to decide which ones are for you and which ones are not.

Thank you I will look into it! This was very helpful. As I have been feeling overwhelmed trying to research it. Having a specific link to go through is helpful instead of, just look through 'all of the internet,' to find it. etc. So I will definitely take a look.

This affirms what I have been feeling about this, and i realized that I am not feeling ready for this, I just pretty recently started therapy, though I feel great not to have to fight to explain symptoms to him, but yeah. edmr still scares me. and i should not have to do something that scares me, so I will let him probably know that. this made me feel better, so thanks.

really spacey and foggy yet again. been listening to music and trying to wait for this pass, but gosh it's annoying.

i realized though i can't really journal with words, i can use pictures. i have been using pur ref to make picture folders for different things, and today i think exploring possibly an alter with them.. so this is interesting.. i have been collecting different kinds of pictures for a while in different kinds of folders, and i just wondered maybe this is why.

been very out of it again. seems like most nights then not, i have been for a bit now. i am trying to rest in the evenings more and seeing if it helps..

anyways what happened was i thought i was exploring a fictive, but then i put a lot of art in and i realized it felt like it was really about holding some kind of trauma, which was not what i was expecting at all. so i guess this is maybe a good revelation possibly.

so been trying to become a professional artist for a while now. but i don't hear people talk about it, but how overwhelming it is to try to take on a large work load like becoming a professional level at something (artists often have to be extremely competitive) and also managing such a delibilating disorder. i am often a bit too pathetic feeling to want to talk about it.. but yeah it's been really hard. especially when i just feel wiped out like i have lately. but yeah. am hanging in there though. not giving up. I don't tell anyone in my potential colleague group about this, cause i feel like it'd just make it worse for me. no one cares about that anyway. it's all about performance at the end of the day. so yeah.. just that it is a lot sometimes.