srhai's big ol' try

That sounds really nice, I'm glad it worked out so well for everyone!

V2

Therapy yesterday again. This session was much less...dramatic, dissociatively speaking. I talked a lot about past traumas, specifically regarding my father and the household I grew up in. I didn't intend it, but I had a really good week last week, and when I told my T as much she commented that I sounded surprised to have had a good week haha. I mentioned it was because I wasn't working as hard, and she focused in on that "hard work" part of me, which honestly IS linked to a lot of trauma and dissociation for me, I just had a hard time noticing that because it's kinda 50/50 if I'm working out of the love of it or out of some internalized fear.

One thing I really noticed was my T insisting I take everything really slow when I'm talking. I guess I started getting really worked up touching on some more traumatizing anecdotes, and she stopped me to make sure I was grounded AS i spoke. I found this very interesting! I've never had anyone do that before, and part of me...okay, me, Star, felt kind of cut off. I don't like being...interrupted. But Srhai I think was really aware that we need to listen to our T, so we listened without being fully aware of why it was even important, but also knowing on some level it was.

I've done some more reading about treating dissociative disorders, and I've found time and time again the importance of "not re-traumatizing." Before learning about DDs, I assumed re-traumatizing was an external event; something that triggers old trauma on the OUTSIDE. Now I'm understanding that re-traumatizing can be an event that seems almost trivial, and can happen through flashbacks or too much stress. It hadn't occurred to me that I can re-traumatize myself in the privacy and comfort of my own home, or even in the room with a professional to help me through it. THAT, that is the thing. I was working under the assumptions that I needed to "work though" my trauma, not "work ON" my trauma. Turns out, working through things just means going through them, again. Now I understand why it's not recommended to drudge up lost memories intentionally, for the sole purpose of having them. It's allowing the traumatic experiences of some parts to integrate with the lived experiences of others in a way that can be managed and healed.

That's been a huge lesson for us. I spent...a couple years, trying to remember thing I had forgotten, feeling stuck and confused and hurt and assuming that if I could drag it all out from where it was hiding in me, it would just...get better. Two years on, and I realize I've been hurting myself more often than I've been helping myself. In a way, the huge life change that's triggered my near constant dissociative state for about four months now was a blessing...being constantly dissociated in an environment where I could actually understand how bad it all is...lead me to research, to trying to find people like me, to discovering DDs even EXIST, and to finding people like me...and to finding out there is help available, but it has to be so specific.

I've learned why my old CBT therapy techniques HAVEN'T worked for certain parts of me. They made my anxiety more tolerable, but it was like...I was only healing the core, the host, and everything else was still in there, just not seen.

Actually, thinking back on it, Star was really the one who pushed us into therapy the first time, and after about three months of Srhai just freezing and crying and barely speaking...suddenly Star took over. She's...more genuinely happy? Than Srhai. Srhai is kind of the dead inside host...much better at managing things, but as a result overcompensates when managing emotions, and puts a lot of them "away". She's not tolerant of experiencing strong emotions, and locks the whole body down if she suspects someone might be watching. Star is open and friendly and kind of a cry-baby, but in a good way. When Srhai's depression ebbed, Star jumped in to fix things, and live a happy life, without the limitations Srhai puts on her.

Star had a couple years of really dominant activity. 2012 and 2015 namely. I always knew I felt like a "different person," but I just assumed it was...what I'm like when I'm happy. I guess that isn't wrong???

I'm off track. Star likes to get off track haha. There's just...so much to say, all the time, that Srhai decides isn't worth saying. She holds back so much that once Star gets out, it's just all talk all the time. It's kind of overwhelming haha.

Anyway, therapy. (Oh, Star also likes to get DISTRACTED and dance around subjects that are too triggering, which is probably why I got off-track talking about therapy.)

After therapy, I thought we all felt pretty good, but hours later I felt REALLY shaken. There was someone inside absolutely losing it, crying, screaming, beating the walls, in equal parts furious and terrified, asking why on earth I would have said all of that, why I would reveal so much, why I would put it somewhere we couldn't take it back. It was so distant, though...the fear and the pain are almost visible, like a color in the room, but the feelings are like a whisper, or the feeling of dread when you feel a hair tickle your arm and think for a moment it could be a spider.

If I focus, I think Srhai is holding it down. Smothering it. There's an awareness inside that it's too much for me to even conceive at this point, but also a sort of defeatist attitude that there's no taking back what I said. I feel this a lot when I open up to my partner, which is much, much more volatile when it happens...this massive wave of "you can't take that back" that's so scary it's almost completely sobering. I think it's a combination of a part waking up that holds that fear, and a nearly conscious decision to put it at a distance. It reminds me of the world blanketed in snow, suppressing the sound all around it.

I think it was a really good discussion to have with my T, even if some parts of me reacted much later to it.

I think the reason I brought all this up in this order must be that I'm trying to reconcile the parts of me that want to work through everything NOW, and the knowledge that I HAVE to take things slowly to avoid hurting myself. It's hard. Star, specifically, tends to get really loud when she has something she feels NEEDS to be said, even if it's painful. I think she's eager to get it out of the system (oh that's a pun. she's good at those) and out somewhere where...maybe we can actually do something with it. So, in that way, I think opening up to a T who so far has been incredibly safe and understanding, was a good move. Better than drawing over the same lines alone, better than retracing old steps in secret; now it's somewhere where we can actually work with it rather than work through it.

Maybe I'll see how this week goes, and if nothing else overrides it, I might mention the parts of me that were really upset by the session. Srhai has a way of dismissing those feelings...if they are far away, they don't matter, and don't deserve recognition. That's obviously not true, but she's been blocking a lot of parts for a long time, and she's really, REALLY stubborn about it. Maybe our T can help her with that, because the only way Star can help is by taking over...which isn't really helping Srhai so much as talking OVER her haha.

Let's end on some good news:

Partner and I talked a little bit more about Star last night and it was really nice. I've noticed a trend over the past 16 year of Star showing herself in ways I never understood...I've always been really captivated by stars and star imagery, but...not the "me" I thought I was. I'd see a star on a shirt and it felt like half of me wanted it SO BADLY and the other half didn't really care one way or the other. Or, I'd always be drawing characters that I really identified with as having long silver hair and light eyes. I always assumed it was just a thing I really liked, for no reason I could imagine, but it was so consistent over more than a decade. Now I'm realizing it was her influence, her finding a way to exist in fiction where I felt embarrassed to have her exist in reality. In a lot of ways she's much more like the teenager I was, but she isn't necessarily younger than me, either. Every time I've decided my personality was "wrong," I gave those parts I no longer wanted to her. Now she exists as talkative, energetic, excited, childlike, but also deeply analytical, with a huge passion for learning and sharing, and a myriad of strong emotions that she feels and embraces whole-heartedly.

She came out to play with one of our pet snakes last night, too. After therapy, she gets kind of all over the place...she's intimidated by the work we do and how it affects the others (she feels them, I manage them), but also she gets SO EXCITED to think through everything, explain why we feel the ways we do, make connections and work on our progress. Like I've said before, making these posts is a joint effort...I don't think it's even possible for me to talk about this stuff alone...she gets so excited and comes out at random points if she has a lot to say or explain or analyze. I'm better at remembering WHAT happened, and she's better at remembering HOW it happened. So, after processing and calming down last night, she decided she really needed to just get out and be her silly self for a while.

Today we have been reading more about trauma-centered dissociation and are both really liking it. She's so desperate to learn, and I'm highlighting things that make me feel validated in the moment so that later I can go back and remember it when I'm feeling really strongly in denial.

My new daily routine is going to include letting Star make her own To Do list of things she wants or needs. We function a lot better if I make time for her, otherwise she just takes over and does what she wants anyway haha. So we are going to go write that down and hopefully have a good, productive day

Z talks around subjects a lot for us. She does it when she senses us becoming overwhelmed. I think it would be connected to what you said about re-traumatising she somehow knows what is to much and when we need an out. Maybe Star dances around subjects sometimes for a similar reason.

Big week this time. Therapy is tomorrow, and I started doing some reading and realized I need to be much more proactive about my therapy. Last time I was in it, I was very reactive, and my T wasn't super engaging, and it wound up being not useful for my trauma/dissociation at all.

Now that I'm in therapy FOR dissociation, I want to keep that from happening again.

The biggest obstacle has been amnesia, for sure. Luckily, I know "myself" well enough that I have a couple different places to record my thoughts (this being one of them!) and I went back and gathered everything I've said and thought and read this week and put it together into one list to take to therapy.

I think I should make this a regular practice! Since I tend to ramble, it's good to put everything into bullet-point form. It almost feels like composing an essay from a bunch of articles, except they are all written by me and about me, and I'm working to figure out what is most actionable/important/etc for the purposes of my therapist!

That being said, I want to talk about some of the more personal problems I've had. That is...problems with a persecutor alter.

My partner has been really struggling lately, and unfortunately their struggles can be triggering for me. Normally it's pretty manageable, but I started feeling kind of smothered, especially after last week's session left me "rattled." I keep having to push down my dissociation and force more functional parts to front, which is...making a certain part of me really, really angry.

This part has always been there, and I have no idea how to interact with it yet. I apparently spoke with it a few days ago, and we agreed on a temporary truce, where we would try and meet its needs more often, with the agreement it would never use the body.

I forgot all about that conversation, though, and there was more and more stress... the thoughts this part has are, frankly, deeply cruel. Normally it lashes just at me, but lately it's been lashing out at my partner (internally). I'm really disturbed by the things it says and feels! When Star and I are able to look at the situation objectively, we are eventually able to "snap out of it" and be there for my partner, but the other night it was really, really hard. I think I felt the angry part get control for just a second, like a strange fire under my skin, but I snapped right back into the front. It was only to open my eyes, but it was already too much. I don't think it means to have broken our truce, but the stress gets unbearable and I think it gets forced into the front and, well, is okay with it, when the rest of us are not.

I can't even reiterate the cruelty I hear in my mind when it's active, it's just...very bad. It's also accompanied by really strong emotional detachment from everyone, including my partner. I wind up comforting them using physical gestures while mentally feeling quite resentful...this is echoing feelings of abuse from someone in my teenage years, feelings that never really got expressed as much as they'd like. There's definitely a part that feels like it never got away from that person, and wants to fight to get away even still. I can't figure out how to communicate with it and figure out what it needs to know that person is no longer here.

It's difficult. And really hard for me to admit that this part exists. That it risks taking over. A big, BIG fear I have is that people will tell me my partner is abusing me, or that these feelings are red flags. I promise you they are not...I trust this person with my life, and I wasn't even able to connect to my parts until this person gave me that safety. But years of my life were taken by that other person, and they were years of absolute silence that part of me is still suffering from.

Does anybody have experience with those kinds of feelings? I know my partner is not an abuser, and not even cruel, just that I'm emotionally overwhelmed and sometimes afraid. How do I reconcile thinking and feeling these things about them? I can't say the things that part wants to say...there are things that once you say them, you can never take back, and my partner is also a victim of severe childhood abuse. I cannot risk hurting them the way I was hurt, and send them back into that. It would be equally damaging to them and myself... but how do I cope with knowing this is inside me?

I will bring it up in therapy if I have time...the nature of the beast is such that...if I'm not stressed, it's dead quiet. It's as if that part doesn't even exist. I can barely even recall the emotions. But it's a stressful time of life, and I don't want to risk hurting my partner or myself. (No risk for physical violence or harm, just fyi!!! I have very confident control over that at least.)

Here is the place where I admit all of that...because I have a hope that people here are familiar. That maybe somebody can look at what I'm seeing as horrifying and heinous and think, "Oh yes, that feeling." I'm too ashamed to admit it anywhere else, with my own voice... thanks

Oh and sorry for being so inactive...I forget this forum exists when I'm really stressed; I hope I don't come across as too cold...just a very busy girl doing the best to cobble this plural life together

We have been living with Ozalces since we were 18 and we are in our 30's (I forgot my age again and the year it is now to work it out born 84) now. He has never done anything to harm us. Most of us believe he never would hurt us. But Nixie especially gets stuck in trauma time and confuses the past and present and becomes scared of Ozalces (she is doing much better but still struggles.)

We try to be clear about what triggers us and her. We have made sure he understands its not about him things we learnt as a child were signs of danger and that sometimes the past and the present overlap and we can't always separate them.

I think it would be especially important for you and your partner to have a conversation like that because it would be easy to end up triggering each other.

Star wants to write here even though I'm uncertain what we have to gain from it.

Therapy yesterday helped us to understand that this persecuting part is not quite as large and menacing as it feels...it's largely just 20+ years of dissociated anger, condensed into something very dense and frightening to the rest of us. But, ultimately, it is mostly just anger, and if we can start to approach that emotion with a degree of compassion, it could help.

Therapy is teaching me a very, very valuable lesson about appreciating and respecting the slow process of integration and acceptance. I thought trauma would leave my body the way it entered it...uncomfortably, loudly, terrifyingly, and met with an unsettling quiet and resolve by the end. But that is not have to heal; we can't heal ourselves through the same process we got traumatized, just in reverse. The unsettling calm we feel after trauma is dissociation, the symptom and mechanism of reacting to trauma, not something we WANT.

In a way, the messiness of emotion is what we want, along with the embracing of it. I've always wanted so much to leave that messiness behind me, somewhere it doesn't matter, can't hurt anyone, can't be seen. And certainly we don't want to become such a mess again, but we do want to begin to touch those feelings without the shame of it being so overwhelming that we simply dissociate it yet again.

We got close to the source of the pain, for just a few seconds, and I felt it as a failure to sit with the emotion the way we were supposed to, but my T told me it was progress. Small, slow progress. The kind that works. And it felt true, so I believe it. I will no longer berate myself for being unable to grasp every part of me without it slipping away. It slips away for a reason. The voices rise and fall for their own reasons, and to each of them I owe safety and comfort. Each voice deserves to have their boundaries respected instead of bashed in.

Maybe what we are learning is that our safety deserves respect. Our boundaries deserve respect. And I suppose that is a lesson I was deprived of from so early on...that my boundaries and safety were subject to the change of whoever was big and scary enough to override them. I cannot treat myself that way, I cannot subject my dissociated feelings to the same insensitivity they were born from. It is slow work, like earning the trust of a wild animal, but it is the only way to achieve trust. And if my parts reject me for disrespecting it, it is not a failure on either of our parts, but a success. I will have to earn their respect in order to heal. I will have to earn my own respect to open doors, not break down walls.

I'm glad Star is here to write these things with me. I've been really on her case about talking too much, or talking in a way I find "cringey" and flowery. She deserves to say what she wants, and deserves to not have me push her away because of it. She really wants what is best for all of us...she knows that before the split, there was the potential for a whole, and she knows that the split has only made us suffer more. I am the one who thinks that pushing people away, myself included, has made us safe. But honesty and safety between me and all the outside people in my life who I love and trust...is the only way we can recover.

I wish I could say, "Well, that's it then! I now respect my entire self! Everybody integrate now!!!" but it doesn't work that way. It could take a long time, and my desire to "get this over with" quickly is not appropriate even if it comes from a place of compassion. The parts of me that are in the dark stay there because their trust has been shattered time and time again, deeply, painfully, and the trust I build with them has to be on THEIR terms. Just because I can't hear their voices doesn't mean I can make decisions for them. So...slow and steady.

I'm glad Star is here at least. I feel like she is really helping me, day to day. She feels more powerfully, and wants me to protect myself when I feel unsafe, which is much healthier than what I do (stay in a situation where I feel unsafe to the point of breakdown). So, now that I can hear her more clearly, and ask her to handle things for me, we are starting to feel healthier and manage our lives better. our life? I suppose my system is not as separated and distinct as other peoples', but treating myself as a person with a dissociative disorder has helped me respect and understand why I have felt fragmented and crazy my entire life, and frame it instead as simply a setup that is different than people who did have a childhood similar to mine. Sharing responsibility between another part instead of feeling torn between two "modes" has decreased a lot of my stress and suffering and confusion. And learning to respect my memory loss rather than hate myself for it...its been a lot.

Relatedly, my therapist might give me a DES to work on next week. I requested it so that I may be able to understand where I fall on the trauma spectrum better. If nothing else, it will make me less ashamed of explaining my experiences to other people, which is really all I want, and a lot of the people closest to me respond best to being able to see a probable diagnosis somewhere, something "clinical" even if it's not important in the grand scheme of recovery.

Star is thankful we wrote this. Thanks everyone. I'll probably be back in a week, but today I'm so exhausted and I have to sign off for a while.

You write very well. Not just from a technical, linguistic standpoint, but also from a creative standpoint. Your writing is so evocative that we can almost experience your process along with you. (We say "almost" because only you can be you.)

We're glad that you started this thread.

MDs