Butterfly's Recovery Journal

Good day to each of you. I am Butterfly (short for my username) and this would be my virtual recovery journal. Before I get into anything too deep, I wanted to share a bit about who I am and what I am dealing with here. I am a woman in my mid-twenties who has a dissociative disorder. I was diagnosed with DID back in 2014, but I honestly think I might fall within the OSDD category instead since I don't lose time? I'm not sure... it's like, I have amnesia surrounding chunks of my childhood, but sometimes I also get more forgetful than usual during my day to day life. The forgetfulness looks like me having a heavy fog around what happened during the same day or other days in the week, despite my not having a complete switch with another part (which I don't recall ever doing), so I don't know... But I don't think I need to be hung up on labels anyways. All I know is that I definitely do have parts and they have been there for as long as I can remember.

As far as I know, all of my parts have helped me to survive a turbulent and rather unusual life. That is all well and good, but there is one part in particular that has had the absolute worst time within our entire system. She goes by the number 14 instead of a name, and it is highly suspected that she is actually a collection of parts rather than a singular part. Within our system, she has always shown the most signs of being traumatized and we have all always tried to help her, but to no avail... that is, until recently.

In summer of 2020, for the very first time, 14 allowed us to refer to her by a title. Prior to this, any attempts to give 14 any sort of name were thwarted by her. She would throw out different types of "red-herrings", hide behind other parts, and do everything in her power to avoid proper detection and analysis. This made most forms of therapy ineffective at treating her, unfortunately, but at the same time we do not blame her. Given the very specific signs of trauma that she shows and has expressed to us over the years, I can sympathize with her want to stay undetected. But again, she is making great strides in her recovery process every single day.

At the beginning of this week, actually, we met with a new therapist to start treatment again, but this time our treatment is not going to be your average run-of-the-mill treatment. Instead, we are going to be focusing very deeply on our heaviest traumas (aka all of the traumas that 14 has been forced to hold). The reasons we think that treatment will actually be effective this time is because 14 is being able to be more expressive and use her words, and also because we have moved away from a living situation where we had to stifle the truth and our struggles in order to appear normal. Because of this, we can now speak as freely as possible in therapy and do more outside of therapy to encourage healing to take place.

Here is to hoping that our efforts during this time pay off!

ButterfliesAnonymous wrote:I honestly think I might fall within the OSDD category instead since I don't lose time? I'm not sure... it's like, I have amnesia surrounding chunks of my childhood, but sometimes I also get more forgetful than usual during my day to day life. The forgetfulness looks like me having a heavy fog around what happened during the same day or other days in the week, despite my not having a complete switch with another part (which I don't recall ever doing), so I don't know...

This does sound a lot like how we live our daily life. It is difficult sometimes to know who we are at one given point in time. And yet, some subtle clues indicate that we are switching. The forgetfulness that you describe, is one of them. Another clue that we have is, how we interact through chat with friends who know about our dissociation. We tend to use symbols or initials at the beginning of our chat messages in order to indicate who we are at one point in time - so that when we scroll back up through the conversation, we can have a better understanding on how the day went, who was here, and also to allow the friends to have a better understanding on why we might have memory lags, understanding issues, and so on. Getting in this habit helped us have a better intuitive idea of our shifts, and we sometimes become aware of co-consciousness through this process: for example, when the person chatting is not the one who is fully front. This also helps us track (by scrolling up through the conversations) what are our respective tastes, opinions, likes, dislikes, characters...

This could be used with for example, a private notebook, document on the computer/phone, or using chat apps that can have a "private" configuration (such as private Discord servers, for example).

ButterfliesAnonymous wrote:That is all well and good, but there is one part in particular that has had the absolute worst time within our entire system. She goes by the number 14

I hope this message will reach her. We from the Arbre-Monde, send all our moral support to Number 14 as well as congratulations for gathering enough courage to tip-toe into therapy. We know how painful, facing the difficult past can be. It does take a lot of courage to do so. But in doing so, it allows for healing, slowly and steadily. And after healing, comes happiness. It is worth the effort.

Your efforts will pay off, we can assure you.

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S.H.

@ArbreMonde Thank you ever so much for the response! I have no doubt that therapy is going to be a very enriching experience this time around. In fact, I believe that it is already starting to show some signs of progress since these days we seem to be having large realizations every single day.

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Some of our recent realizations:

1. 10% of our healing process will occur in therapy. The other 90% happens during our daily lives and is up to me to initiate. The therapist is not a magical healer, and one hour a week would hardly be enough to make any lasting difference on its own.

2. The roadmap to healing has always existed inside of me, and now that I am in the best position to help myself, I now know what to do.

3. Sometimes 14 wants to self harm, and that is because we have a lot of big overwhelming feelings that we cannot put into words. We can try to, but it feels like forcing words out of a toddler who is just learning to speak. It is difficult and frustrating, but we are learning to use our words and say what we need to say bit by bit. Every time we try, it gets a bit easier, so we are trying to foster an environment of patience inside.

4. We have been having dreams in the same dream universe for over a year now, and I hadn't thought to start dream journaling until my therapist asked me to. It's really such an interesting and well fleshed-out place that I'm dreaming myself into every time I sleep. It also shows a great leap in my healing process because it has helped us to build our own spaces of relaxation and safety on the inside. That was very hard to do before.

5. I seem to be feeling a sense of revenge on the inside these days, but it's not what you'd think. Our revenge is going to be living our life well despite what happened to us, but also speaking the truth in therapy with reckless abandon. For years there was a certain terror surrounding telling the truth about what happened to us; so much so that anytime we got slightly close to uncovering more of the truth, everyone on the inside would freak the heck out. But now no one holds any oppressive sorts of power over us, so now we can use our words and our voices to speak the truth. And the best part is that we don't even care if it gets mandated reported anymore(due to the severity of it all).

6. There is a large chance that having anything reported wouldn't lead to much of anything happening because of the fact that it all happened so long ago and there doesn't seem to be any real evidence. Even still, there is a sense of peace being felt at the same time. No matter what, because we are telling the truth, our fear is being washed away because we are realizing that they can't keep us silent any longer. The truth really will set us free, if only we let it.

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My Personal List of Treatment Options

• Mindful Living
• Meditation
• Art Exercises
• Mind/Body Exercises (Pilates/Yoga)
• Journaling
• Spiritual Prayer
• Sunlight Exposure
• "Forest Bathing"
• Eating Nutritious Meals
• Phone-Free time
• Socializing with others
• Reading a book
• Sitting with a comfort object
• Visiting a Library (Surrounded by books)
• EMDR (In therapy only)

If I am being honest, it feels like I am losing my family again. The first time I lost my family, it was my mom's side of the family. I lost them because I spoke out against my mother abusing both me and one of my siblings. After she lost custody of that sibling, I lost contact with virtually everyone for years. There are a few that still talk to me every blue moon, but it will never be the same ever again. That side of the family was the one I grew up closest to because they were the only ones I really knew.

After leaving my mom, I moved in with my paternal grandparents. They were very helpful and I am thankful for their help, but things were toxic at that house too. There was no physical abuse, but there was a lot of religious coercion and shaming as well as an unusual amount of controlling. For example, multiple times between the ages of 19 and 24, they gave me a bedtime, demanded that I not take my phone into my bedroom after a certain time, and strongly discouraged me from looking at any other churches or religious organizations apart from their own. It was bad, so I ended up leaving a few months ago because I couldn't take it anymore. Other members of the family (their children and other relatives that lived with them or had contact with them) got the same kind of treatment. To this day, many of them don't say anything to my grandparents (particularly grandma) about it because they are afraid that she will "fall into a depression" or start showing up at their houses unannounced (she does this a lot anyways with some family members). And when I would try to confront her in the past, she would play the victim and say that she felt she had to walk on eggshells everytime she talked to me. This came after a time when my therapist asked her to attend a therapy session with me.

After moving out, I stopped going to their church and have only spoken to them once since then. I moved about two months ago. But I also have not spoken with any other paternal family members since then, except the independent aunt that I live with and my father and stepmom. It feels nice to have the distance, but I feel a shred of guilt at the same time. It feels like I'm cutting them off and that I will eventually be left with no one. People come and go anyways, but once you lose your entire family (both sides) then it feels like you truly are at a disadvantage, especially if you haven't had any friends since the fifth grade thanks to your abusive mother isolating you from non-familial contact from middle school until high school.

Being a person is so difficult. When you have a personality and assert your free will, people don't like it and they leave or they turn their backs on you... I don't regret becoming more of a person. I just regret being in multiple situations where being a person was too much for others to handle.

ButterfliesAnonymous wrote:When you have a personality and assert your free will, people don't like it and they leave or they turn their backs on you...

Only people who benefit from abusing you and destroying your boundaries, turn your back at you. Real friends and family respect your boundaries.

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Aragorn.

@ArbreMonde You're right. That is exactly why I'm starting to cut family like that out of my life. I'm tired of living lies. I just want to be me, whoever that turns out to be.

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Life is complicated and tends to overwhelm me a lot. Now that I am doing things more on my own as an adult, I get exhausted very quickly. It's nice, though, that now my thoughts have the freedom to be whatever they want to be and there's no outside pressure for me not to think. It gives me the energy to enjoy life more.

Right now I am learning how to live my life as someone who has personhood and I am also learning how to enjoy life without a romantic partner... It's not really funny, but I thought that I would spend my entire life under other people's directions. I thought I would only leave toxic situations if I got married, but after that, I fully expected to be someone who would do whatever their husband wanted of them. I am still trying to free myself from that way of thinking, but it is incredibly difficult since I have had such thoughts since I was six.

My homework this week was to write down trauma beliefs that I want to work on in therapy. I think I might start working on that list right about now.

I have an overwhelming need to create a new thread every time I have something that I want to say, but now I am beginning to see the issue with that. In doing this, I seem to unnecessarily clog the DID subforum with multiple threads. I guess the reason that I do this is because I get fearful that no one will care to read my posts once my journey thread becomes too long or is no longer "new enough", and then I will be speaking into an empty vacuum. I understand that it's a silly thought, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to keep my thoughts on this one thread for the most part moving forward.

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I re-watched Howl's Moving Castle a few nights ago and found myself getting very enveloped in the story. Mostly, I was watching for the developing romance between Howl and Sophie (shamelessly imagining myself in Sophie's shoes the entire time), but I was also watching for the overall story. In the end, I was motivated to buy the book that the movie was somewhat based on. The movie changed a lot of elements, I hear, and so I feel like reading the book is going to be a whole other adventure of its own; one that I would love to enjoy the ride for...

But with reading a book, there is a great sadness that accompanies it. In the event that you should find a good book that really strikes a chord with your heart and/or soul, you will enjoy the journey of reading the text. At the same time, however, you must contend with the fact that even the greatest of stories must come to an end at some point. It truly is a melancholy time when you reach the very end of a book or book series and realize that it's over. The book has ended and there is no more beyond what has been written. You may find fanfictions to tend to the aching wounds of a freshly finished book, but even those will reach an end. For this reason, I seem to be feeling a bit of trepidation towards reading my copy of Howl's Moving Castle.

But then, I suppose it would be a tragedy for me to treat all wonderful texts in such a fearful manner. Reading and travelling to distant, imaginary, and sometimes magical lands is what aids us in our maturation and growth as people... at least, that is what I have found in my case, no matter which book it was that I delved into. No matter what, you never come out the same once you reach the other side of reading a book. Somehow, though the world around you stays stagnant in its own right, it feels as though you have somehow changed in one way or another. Perhaps it was your perception of others situations or your own that has changed. Maybe it has something to do with caring for yourself, learning a major life lesson, or many other things. Literature truly is a powerful force.

I can think of a great many books without which my life would have taken a wildly different turn. I would never dream of taking those books away from younger me, no matter what the pains of finishing the books entailed. So I suppose it would be a terrible disservice to myself to continue to deprive myself of reading good stories for fear of injuring my own feelings. I believe that the same can be said of living life when it comes down to it. If you hide yourself away for fear of being harmed by the outside world, then you're likely wasting your life away. You're missing out on so many beautiful events, connections, sights, smells, and experiences. Again, though the feelings of loss hurt, I wouldn't dare take away the colorful experiences of my youth that helped to make me into the person that I am today.

I guess this is all to say that we should all do our best to live life to the fullest. Be wise with your decisions, but don't be afraid to take risks at the same time. It will hurt sometimes, but that is part of the experience of being alive. You must deal with pain at one point or another, but what we do next is up to us.

So I don't know about you, but I'm going to try to read my new book and go on an adventure with it.

& Regarding long threads: look around. There are journal threads that are super duper long and people keep seeing them and answering so, no fear about that

& Regarding books: you sure hit the nail on the head! Books are awesome, painfully awesome! We soooo relate to what you wrote about reading books!

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Urielle

I have an unsurprising confession to make. In the grand scheme of things, I don't feel as though I have many friends at all, if any, that I can be completely honest and open with. It pains me because I've been seeking that sort of positive connection for my entire life. I know there is still time and I still have a chance, but it is still so very hurtful in the moment that I haven't any real friends with whom I can share my innermost thoughts and emotions.

I suspect a lot of people probably would not like me very much due to the fact that I don't seem to have much in common with people who are "mainstream". I'm just different in a lot of ways that make it hard for me to connect with people my own age. I could probably connect better with people in their thirties or maybe forties, but then that can be a red flag depending on the contexts involved. People will take advantage of others who are young and feel that they are very mature for their age. So I'm stuck in a sort of hellish limbo, at the moment, where I can connect to almost no one on a deep level. It makes life very lonely for me.

I don't want to have millions of friends whom I cannot be myself around or have deep conversations with. I would be happy with even just a handful of friends that are willing to be there for me as I would be willing to be there for them. Anything would be better than living a life without anyone who's shoulder you could cry on. I don't expect people to fix me, but I am also human. I need human connections if I am going to make it in this world. Humans are social creatures, after all, at least to some capacity. I just wish I knew of places or options of where I could find friends where it would be safe and I wouldn't constantly be worrying about if this person would hurt me or not (physically or emotionally) if they were given the opportunity to.

I love myself and I love imaginary places in books... but having no friends or lasting bonds with anyone that I won't eventually outlive one day is a pain that no person should have to bear. I just want to be loved from other people too, even if that love is platonic only.

We used to feel the same before we realized that we are autistic. Now we seek the company (online, mostly) of other autistic people, and we have better social interactions this way. Birds of a feather, after all...

Good luck with your social life.

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van H.