To be or not to be

Hi,

You guys are doing a really good job. You're super brave! I think our flexibility and ability to change quickly is our super power. We can adapt way faster than singletons. We're like a Swiss Army knife - lots of different tools for every kind of situation.

Good luck with your boyfriend.

Iain

Sometimes I think it's not worth trying to take your abuser to court. All that has happened is he has been able to torture us more makeing us recount over and over what happened to us. The court at least is happy that we are currently sane and we will be able to keep custody of our real world child but it looks like our abuser may go unpunished. He is now pushing the "unreliable witness" angle because at the time of the abuse I was dissociated in an amnesic fashion. There are only 3 upsides to all this. 1 the longer this goes on for the longer our child does not have to have contact. 2 I have recently been informed that the abuser can no longer afford to pay his fancy lawyer so he may end up representing himself. 3 if another psych eval is to be done Dr Doug my old therapist will be doing it so it will be great to see him again and tell him how far we have come.

Sigh

I know the feel. Ourselves have been shut out of court process at the "going to the police to report things" stage because of a fudgeton of bullshirt arguments. Which makes the abusers even more confident in their gaslighting.

Sometimes, I just can't even. Being able to dissociate these memories to function normally on a daily basis feels like a blessing sometimes. We know that it's not good to stay dissociated like that but having some of us completely cut from the trauma really is soothing when they front. The whole "forgetting" part can lead to anxiety for Zami because "if we forget it means it never happened and the abusers win" but gosh, being able to just be in the present without any memory of the trauma is necessary sometimes.

Well, all of this to say, I totally relate. Keep safe. Stay strong. We are with you in spirit.

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The G/Hosts.

Today was a bad day.

So thanks to someone jumping in a bath hot enough to melt our hormone patch we have been hemorrhaging for over a week. (unstable uteral lining once we start a period it doesn't stop just gets heavier and heavier, blergh. We are on blood clotting medicine to get it back under control)

We have not felt so strongly dysphoric in a long time like we wanted to tear our skin off and boil it. After scrubbing until we were red raw we put on our binder and packer and it still wasn't enough. So we went to the barbers for a zero fade mullet. The barbers have only ever seen us male so they treet us as male. They arnt quite sure if we are an efeminate gay or post op trans but they have never questioned our masculinity.

It was sanity saving affirmation. Unfortunately the side effect of such a strong revulsion is that our Uber fem alter has felt unwanted and has had to hide in her private section. She knows we arnt attacking her for being female but I guess it feels personal that we should hate being biologically female in such a vivid way.

It's a loose loose situation with this body as the internal gender divide is 50/50. If we were to transition we would only cause dysphoria in the females.

Sigh, things were going so well I guess we were due a wobble.

OUCHIES. I am glad that we rarely become that dysphoric anymore. But I remember a time when we used to be in this situation and I can relate a lot.

I can promise that it gets better. After one year of T we are in near-constant euphoria. Before that it was near-constant dysphoria.

So, it gets better. It is very difficult to go through the hard moments but I promise, it gets better.

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Isaïa.

dysphoria is such an ordeal, and it comes and goes unexpectedly.

Eliseahorse wrote:
We have worked out that the fluctuations in who is available to front are largely influenced by our hormone cycle. This is a comfort and also a worry. A comfort because it makes things vuagly predictable. A worry because things like pregnancy, menopause are huge hormone disruptors, what will happen to the system if/when those events come about.

we are practicing blends asking our partner how obvious is it when the littles are blended in with us. It feels weird and slightly out of control very impulse based and is definitely something that can only be sustained for a few moments but if those few moments are enough for the littles to have a hug from dad it will be so healing for them.

Before menopause the host (at the time) had no idea there were others inside. Going into peri-menopause seemed to trigger many of us out but we had only lived on the inside, a few got occasional glimpses at the outside world. It maybe easier for you as you already know about your system, so it won't be a complete shock if someone else appears!

We now use a rota because it was chaos for us for the first few years of peri-menopause when the monthlies were every erratic. We had a lot of difficulties with a very angry alter who seemed unable to contain their rage about anything and everything.

We also blend a little..well I say '..we' I don't actually go...but host blends with one (adult) who identifies as the host's mother so the siblings is 'her child' too. She also likes to be 'present in the moment of the hug' but otherwise takes a back seat and just helps host with social conversation. They like to share memories of the house as it was when they lived there as mother and daughter.

Sometimes they co-pilot the body as 15yr old twins (we found old photo of the mum at 15 and the host at 15 and of course they look very alike! ..if they'd been 15 at the same time (in real life) they would have looked like identical twins side by side!

Sometimes the little's also co-pilot with an adult to play video games or hold the dog's lead while adult is driving the (mobility) scooter. Like you the little's don't speak externally while the body is outside the house or any other person is present in the house with us.

Jody

Urgh we hate being ill. Specifically we hate tonsillitis. It is so triggering. One of our littles hates it because he had chronic tonsillitis when the body was young and we were ignored so feelings of neglect are rife for him right now. The scratchy sore sensation constantly triggers a very nasty memory for our age slider so she has to be kept deep in our unconscious untill this is over otherwise we risk PTSD episodes. Big downside to that is she is the one that contains our cooking skills. And our ex host is triggered while we sleep because the swelling in our tonsillis keeps obstructing our airway. So she keeps waking in the middle of the night screaming because she is having flashbacks to when our host used to strangle/sufforcate us in our sleep.si between the ones that can't come to the front without being triggered and the ones staying behind to buffer / filter input we are running on just 2 adults 1 child.
It's been so long since we have had to forcably seperate that I had forgotten how much of our knowledge isn't my knowledge but only accessable to me when I was fronting because we were working in the cooperative.

We all feelin better now -peter

Glad you're better now. That sounded awful!!