Need Moral Support

I’m typing this out before going to work. I just have to get my thoughts out.
I’ve checked with a therapist for possibly doing sessions outside my job hours. He’ll be back in a couple of weeks. He even said it’s okay to send him something I started writing, listing and trying to figure out if I have DID. Basically, it’s recalling what voices I’ve been hearing in my life. Maybe I can see if they’re distinct personalities... if they’re different.
Meanwhile, it’s aggravating trying to get therapy for this and waiting. In some sense, it’s the most important thing in my life. Do I lose money (paid with temp job) or to I keep waiting and skip the therapy and try to do it myself?

Why not both?

See what the therapist has to offer, see what things you can do without the therapist/that the therapist cannot do, and work on both aspects.

Journalling things is always helpful, even if it's only for you. The results can be used as a tool to work with the T, or to fish from it what you need the T to help you with. It's okay to need a T for some points but not all of them. It's okay to be able to work most of it yourself. It's okay if you need T for most of the things.

Whatever you need, it's okay. It's your needs. So, maybe start from here, journalling, figuring out your needs, and from that, see which ones to bring to the T which ones not to bring to the T, and work from here?

I understand your concern about "loosing money". We have a tight budget too due to health spendings. Only by figuring out what you need, can you judge if seeing a T would be "lost money" or "money well spent".

--Zami-- and a few others maybe? not sure

Sorry you're stuck having to make these choices.

We had similar thing... when our DID crisis started, I think it was only 2 days into it and we decided we needed to see a therapist. We got on a waiting list but it was still about 6 weeks before we could actually get in to see her.

We spent the 6 weeks reading everything we could about DID, online, books, and of course spent a lot of time on here, reading, lurking, and posting.

Only you can make the choice about whether you should take time off work to try therapy. You know your situation best, wrt needing money versus needing help.

We asked once, whether it was possible to 'go it alone' and work on our problems just with books & forum support. I think consensus was, its possible to get some progress, but its not easy and its not safe. And there's some stuff you just can't fix by yourself.

Good luck!

V1

Amythyst wrote:We asked once, whether it was possible to 'go it alone' and work on our problems just with books & forum support. I think consensus was, its possible to get some progress, but its not easy and its not safe. And there's some stuff you just can't fix by yourself.

V1

Seconding that.

You can create communication by yourselves, you're the ones doing that job anyway. You're the one doing support things to cope in everyday life anyway, T can have good tools to give you but if you read a lot of books and hang out in here, you learn some of them that way too. There are lot of good advises, how to make your home safe, how to stay in window of tolerance, lots of things you can find from books or places like birdsong's blog for example.

I don't believe at all you can cure your own trauma. Basically what most if not all of us have is attachment issues, and you can only work with attachment issues in a relationship with another human. Working with unhealthy attachment is way beyond friendship stuff, you need to be able to act as avoidant or as clingy ways you feel, and it's Ts job to know the boundaries of healthy attachment, stop you from getting dependent on them, while still keeping you feeling fully accepted. Forum can not be that relationship, you're gonna be re-traumatized, if you try when those issues start to come up. You need someone emotionally healthy and stable for that, and you're not that yourselves, neither are we, or any book or study. And you don't know how deep that is before you're there.

Reassuring yourself away from traumatic beliefs you have is not possible either. You believe in them, that's the point in them. System members can help each other to some extent, adults can help littles, but what happens when adults can't cope? Or if you can't stay as an adult because you're too triggered?

Digging trauma memories is not safe, especially if you're not 100% sure you know everything there is, and no one can be. Even if you could, you still don't know how it feels to start experiencing that again, which is great risk if you're trying on your own.

Bad T can do a lot of damage too. There's things to do on your own, but trauma processing is something you can't do safely and without it you won't be cured. So when you're without a T, there's only certain point you can work yourself safely into. Ts don't do trauma processing either with clients if their life and mind are not stable enough for that, and it's balancing all the time between staying grounded enough so you won't be overwhelmed.

People come in here sometimes with hard questions we really do not know answers to, it's a guessing game to try to help. We can't be responsible if we give wrong advice, we can never know the full situation, we're not professionals and professionals would ever give online advice to hard situations without knowing the situation. We know theories, some more and some less, but with hard questions, the answer usually is to ask do you have a T? And if not, the advice many times is to try to get one. Books don't have answers to specific life situations and understanding theories only gets you so far, you understand yourself better, but more you get to know, more you realize it's complicated mess even most professionals do not understand.

It doesn't mean there's no hope for people without therapy, you can do a lot to cope better with everyday life if that's a struggle. How much, it depends on the case, on the system and how big and easily co-operative it is, how safe your life is etc.

Seconding everything that Floralie said.