More than one version of me?

by **MakersDozn** » Wed Jan 29, 2020 6:50 pm

Johnny-Jack wrote:We spend a lot of time doing things that don't move our adult life forward. Young alters are doing their thing and it's been a decades long pattern of avoidance. If we were remotely close to reaching our potential or if it didn't cause us tons of money in lost opportunities, it wouldn't be such a problem. Way too much time watching TV, way too much piddling on the computer and computer files, way too much avoiding things we reasonably need to take care of as a responsible adult.

These aren't just young teen alters choosing how to spend their time, the choices are rooted in trauma, and serve to calm the mind and not focus on the bad stuff. I'm surprised the adult alters have had collectively enough time in the life to have a decent job, buy a home, have any success really.

This.

For the first few decades of our life, childhood and adolescence in particular, we got through life simply by showing up. We were an above-average student who could get good grades simply by being on autopilot.

This approach has been increasingly untenable for us in the four decades of adulthood that have followed. Growing up on autopilot and not having any real life guidance left us confused and insecure in dealing with adulthood and its responsibilities. It's such a complex burden to sort through that even now, we still don't feel like we know what we're doing.

MDs

MakersDozn wrote:
Johnny-Jack wrote:We spend a lot of time doing things that don't move our adult life forward. Young alters are doing their thing and it's been a decades long pattern of avoidance. If we were remotely close to reaching our potential or if it didn't cause us tons of money in lost opportunities, it wouldn't be such a problem. Way too much time watching TV, way too much piddling on the computer and computer files, way too much avoiding things we reasonably need to take care of as a responsible adult.

These aren't just young teen alters choosing how to spend their time, the choices are rooted in trauma, and serve to calm the mind and not focus on the bad stuff. I'm surprised the adult alters have had collectively enough time in the life to have a decent job, buy a home, have any success really.

This.

For the first few decades of our life, childhood and adolescence in particular, we got through life simply by showing up. We were an above-average student who could get good grades simply by being on autopilot.

This approach has been increasingly untenable for us in the four decades of adulthood that have followed. Growing up on autopilot and not having any real life guidance left us confused and insecure in dealing with adulthood and its responsibilities. It's such a complex burden to sort through that even now, we still don't feel like we know what we're doing.

MDs

This is kinda going OT for the thread but, we've been rereading this a few times, Johnny-Jack & MDs, cos it kinda struck us & connected with some stuff we talked about with our T today.

We've had kinda the opposite thing going on. From when we were 14yo till the body was like mid 40s, so like, over 30 years straight, we were taken advantage of, exploited, & taken for granted, by our family. In our teens we were put into work with high responsibility and stress, but at a fraction of the pay.

It wasn't all work, but even when we weren't at work, we had to be available. Like 'on call'. If we'd been paid appropriately for the kinda stuff we had to do, we'd be way better off today.

But anyways, thats not my point...

What I thot of when I read your posts was like, we have teen alters running things now, cos we couldn't be teens when we shoulda. We were put into loads of stress & responsibility, & expected to take it like someone twice our age.

And after like 30+ years of that & all the other ways the family used us, we finally fell apart completely and now we're like just barely competent and the only thing keeping us going with work, is we're kinda coasting on what our previous host did. Just hoping we can keep coasting long enuf to get back to the point where we can actually work like normal people again.

Except I don't care if we never do the same kinda work again. We're not her & we don't hafta do what she did. We'll figure out something else that we wanna do.

Viola

by **TheGangsAllHere** » Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:10 pm

Johnny-Jack wrote:Speaking only for our system, it's a huge challenge for us because sometimes it's not working for us. We spend a lot of time doing things that don't move our adult life forward. Young alters are doing their thing and it's been a decades long pattern of avoidance. If we were remotely close to reaching our potential or if it didn't cause us tons of money in lost opportunities, it wouldn't be such a problem. Way too much time watching TV, way too much piddling on the computer and computer files, way too much avoiding things we reasonably need to take care of as a responsible adult.

These aren't just young teen alters choosing how to spend their time, the choices are rooted in trauma, and serve to calm the mind and not focus on the bad stuff. I'm surprised the adult alters have had collectively enough time in the life to have a decent job, buy a home, have any success really.

There's plenty of time we don't know who's fronting and it doesn't matter, who cares, the activity is productive. And some leisure time would be fine, that's normal and necessary, it just shouldn't use up maybe 90% of the time outside work and even encroach into our work time.

This is more helpful than you can know, Johnny-Jack, thank you. Of course we have times where we are not only being unproductive, we're avoiding doing what anyone really wants to be doing--for the reason you described, which is to avoid bad stuff or even reminders of having parts. There is a big difference between having satisfying leisure time that is truly taking care of some of the parts vs. avoiding things in a dissociative way that just puts off things that need to be dealt with.

In fact, it's more the purpose that the activity is used for than the activity itself. There are times when I really feel like playing solitaire on my phone, and very distinctly different times when I NEED to be playing solitaire on my phone in order to avoid something I don't want to think about.

I'm not sure the avoidant times are due to any one particular part fronting, but it sure would be useful to find out and see if we could approach this in a way that was more healthy for the system as a whole.

by **MakersDozn** » Thu Jan 30, 2020 4:05 pm

Viola, your last post really resonates with us. We're sorry you had to go through that.

Our teens have historically had a great deal of responsibility for running our system, particularly while I retreated for quite a number of years. I couldn't handle running such a large system. Mary was the only other adult, and she had not been designated with as high a level of responsibility as I had. I don't want to digress into the complexities of how responsibilities were structured. But the end result was that the teens ended up running everything for a long time.

I've been trying to remedy this during the last few years. It pains me to know how I've distressed the system and others in it by not doing my share. I know that some of the others don't put much stock in my saying so, but it's true. And now all I can do is exert my best effort to do my part now.

We hope your situation improves, Viola and all.

Charity

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