[life journey thread]Tales from the WorldTree

I was able to ask my parts to "follow a filing style" because I'm fully integrated now. If I had tried that before integration it would have failed. In fact I did not even try to do anything else than "sorting things out" before trauma work and integration, because it's like trying to put tiles on the roof before you even set up the wooden structure of the roof. It's nice to know what tiles you want where, but at the end of the day, you still need to do the carpentry first if you want a full roof.

But it's okay, most people focus on the roof tiles first because that's what we see first. It's okay to try things untill we find what works for us at a given point in time / on our recovery journey. Things that did not work last year might work this year!

And once you have a proper plan, to keep up with the roof metaphor, you can work your roof front to back and do the whole "carpentry to tiles" front, then middle, then back (or front, then back, then middle), as long as on one area the "carpentry to tiles" order is respected you don't have to do the whole roof carpentry, then the whole roof tiles, etc. In fact that's why the "3 steps therapy protocole" (stabilization, trauma work/integration work, learning to live a normal life) is not exactly three separate steps and once you've done stabilization it's done for good and set aside. It's more like "stabilize everything you can until you are ready for trauma work; do some trauma work; stabilize what came out; integrate some ressources; stabilize; learn how to use said ressource in a normal life; stabilize; try some more trauma work; stabilize again" etc. It means that you need to be stable before you do trauma/integration work, and that you cannot learn a "normal life" is you don't have any integration you need to learn to live with. BTW "learning a normal life" does not mean "pretending not to have had DID" it means "learning the full scope of the things you can do now that you have integrated a ressource or healed a trauma". The name of the step is not very explanatory. xD

Hope I did not get lost in my metaphors and everything. It's been a long day and the first nap-free day since the surgery. Btw I'm doing better than expected, less pain than expected, though the awkward swellings are more awkward to manage than I first imagined. They should be mostly gone by the end of the month.

Glad to hear the sugary has gone well.
Fantastic that your physical journey has helped your mental journey.
The metaphor was perfect.

Some updates!

Surgery: healing is going according to plan. The little difficulties are so usual in this type of surgery that it's almost part of the process at this point. No bad surprise whatsoever during the exams so far. Pain is very low to inexistant.

Grandma: my "Schrödinger grandma" had another health issue a few days ago, my mother went through the whole "end of the world" shenanigans again while showering her text messages with cute emojis (gosh the dissociation between tone and content in her texts...) aaaand... grandma is stable again. She still has the health of a horse (stable, horse... please laugh) at the edge of her life. Now I'm angry at my mother for going through the "this is not a drill" act for nothing once again. It's like health is binary for my mother: under a given line it's "no problem" and past this like it's "call the mortician" and my grandmother is playing hopscotch across this line since the past 2 years or so. Meaning my mother is incoherently reporting grandma both dead and alive depending on which side of the line she stands. Its exhausting, I can never know for sure the real state of the people. She can casually drop the "btw we buried X last week, kisses kisses hugs hugs xoxoxoxo hearts hearts" and in the same message "oh the horror, the end of the world, the suffering!!!!! Y has caught... a cold it's awful !!!!" Her messages are dissociation in a nutshell. But I also know that if I show my anger too much, I'll have no news since my father refuses to bypass her for the important news. Best I can have from him is "something happened with X, ask your mother".

I'm tired, (boss) mom.

We liked the stable/horse joke!

Your mothers reaction reminded me of someone we knew her son had an headache it did turn out to be a brain tumour so every time anyone had an headache or felt sick etc she would immediately go into like a panic convinced it could be something serious that had been missed.

Has your mother ever had such an incident with past members of her family? Maybe it would explain her behaviour around the issue of your grandmother?

Glad your surgery recovery is going well anyway!

Shadowlands wrote:Has your mother ever had such an incident with past members of her family? Maybe it would explain her behaviour around the issue of your grandmother?

My family is very dissociative on both side, lots of transgenerational trauma on my mother's side, denial about it and lots of maladapted toxic behaviors as a result (trauma repetition on oneself or others, addictions, etc) There is a lot of dichotomy in my mother's behavior, she is very "two faced" in all her aspects. Becoming aware of how it impacts me (dissociating to mirror her own dissociation) is one heck of a ride. I'm glad I only contact her through text message and only few and far between. She can trigger my dissociation through a short text message. Makes me realize how fudged-up it was for me, growing up with such a dissociative mother, dissociating in order to cope with her own incoherent behavior, etc. I better understand why every word from her would make me uneasy and dizzy when I was a child. That's dissociation. She used to make me dissociate with a mere word, a mere glance.

TL;DR: my mother's dissociation level has always made her incoherent about everything.

It's over now. Grandma has finally passed away. I'm relieved the wait is over.

Predictably, my mother's message were filled with more hearts and xoxo and other cute emojis than a cheesy Valentine's card. At least I was expecting it.

I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother and your mothers difficulties and impact on you.

Big hugs for any that need and want them.

CW : mention of family violence (being indirect witness of)

It's been a rough, dissociative month: the neighbors' kid spends circa 2h a day screaming in distress on their balcony, the upstairs neighbor has been through a lot of noisy violence too and now she's in the hospital (we met in the main hall after one of my post surgery exams and chatted for like 2 mins), my post-surgery appointments are being moved around all the time meaning I have to move my medical taxi around all the time, I can never know for sure when the nurse will come for the at-home care (she's sometimes a bit late, sometimes early, sometimes on time and sometimes she messages me all day saying "I'm coming in 1h" to finally show up at 7 or 8 PM), there is one thing that does not heal properly so I have to keep the catheter which is becoming more and more upsetting because my dyspraxia means it gets caught everywhere when I move which hurts, the stitches itch like crazy, there is a heat wave, there were my grandmother's passing shenanigans, it's a bad time for my friends and my partner too so we butt head a lot because I have more dissociative symptoms visible and I can mask my autism social disability less and they are more stressed too, so much so that now my partner has broken up with me because I take too much time to go back on tracks and he told me "no contact". Did not even allow me to go through the whole post-surgery shenanigans nor to set an appointment with my therapist before taking the decision. Worse, he broke up after I told him I was arranging to see my therapist to sort things out because obviously I could not fix things without help despite all my trying but reaching out for help was not good enough either. Oh and I don't even know if he told the rest of the friend group about the breakup and after all the headbutting lately I just don't want to be the one breaking the news because I've been through enough already and I'm one straw away from touching rock bottom.

I'm a glass case of emotions. I have to deal with bullshirt atop of the regular shirt and I'm splitting up again. Fork, knife, spoon and the rest of the cutlery. FML

This must be really tough not only to be able to hear what’s going on with other neighbours situations from inside your own place but your partner also bailing. It’s a shame they weren’t willing to go to counselling with you or at least wait until you had that professional support.

I hope it won’t cause too much of a problem with your system. I don’t know much about gender surgery but assuming some alters integrated because they felt happier you were going through the process and they felt better about themself as a result … that is still happening, so they may not re-split????

Would the ones particularly upset by the split with partner agree to even temporarily go take a break inside (go dormant) until you’ve at least finished physically recovering from your current surgery? With one …or a small team agreeing to ‘front’ to get you through the rest of the surgery process?