Healing and Learning (TW for Future Posts)

Someone mentioned journey threads to me in a previous post and after reading some of the threads on here I decided that would be good for me. I have so many questions and concerns, it would be nice to have one place to put them all.

I have been reading other posts. I'm a bit nervous to reply to other people's topics because I'm still learning about dissociation and I also don't want to intrude. I find a lot of you to be so insightful, though, and I do want to get to a point where I can reply and show support! For now I will show it here. Even though I haven't replied, I've been listening and I hope everyone is doing well!

I am doing okay. I realized recently that I can "tune in" to other trains of thought, ones I have no control over. I didn't realize how much my parts talk, to each other and to me. I thought it would be a bit scary to have contact with them, but it's actually encouraging. It makes me feel like I can learn to function with this.

Also, thank you to the voice who reassured me when I was worried about my cat this morning (she was completely fine and nothing was ever wrong, I just didn't know where she was and was getting much more anxious than was reasonable.) I don't know if you heard me thank you for being comforting, so I'm posting it here, both to show public appreciation and in case it's more likely to reach you!

I'm trying to be more appreciative of my parts, publicly and privately. I've been unfair to a lot of them in the past and want to make up for that. I think that's going to be it's own post on the thread.

I'm kind of nervous to post about this, but it's something that for some reason I need to talk about. I'm also wondering if anyone else has anything like this?

All of the parts of myself I've become aware of seem to be male (possibly some are nonbinary.) I'm not completely sure, but I definitely get the sense that none of them are female, which seems kind of odd to me because I'm a girl?

I know I'd be very very uncomfortable with any of them being female. I'm not really sure why that is. I'm a feminist and I don't think there's anything wrong with being a girl at all. I'm completely happy with my identity as a woman and most people in my social circle are female. But whenever I even consider that maybe there's a female part I haven't discovered, I get a strong negative feeling. Like no, that's not there, and that doesn't make sense.

I guess maybe it makes sense for none of them to be female if it feels so uncomfortable (or the discomfort comes from them not wanting to be mistaken as girls?) I used to feel like maybe I was forcing them to pretend to be male to make me more comfortable, but I'm aware of about seven or eight parts now and none of them seem to be girls. I know there must be a reason for this but I have no clue what it is.

Hello there!

It's very common to have different parts with different genders! Some systems are fully one gender, others are not. It's completely okay!

In here some of us are even fluid, either in gender or in body or both.

It's okay if it takes you time to understand exactly why your system is the way it is. In here we ended up understanding that as a whole person, we are transmasculine non-binary with a queer/femboy presentation.

There are many resasons why your parts might be mostly masc or emby: because you feel safer this way in a mysogynistic society; because a lot of persons/characters you can look up to are more masc/emby than fem; because a lot of the people who hurt you were fem; because the whole feminity of the system is "used up" by you and there is none left for the rest of the system; and it's only what I can think of from the top of my hat!

Every system is different and their structure is always what it needs to be in order to deal with what they went through. And it's very interesting to see the many different experiences we have and how they make us evolve as systems and persons and what we do with them on our healing journeys!
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G/Hosties.

Thanks for your insight! I've always felt weird about it because I feel like a lot of the ways we work are different from other dissociative people that I've come across, so it's good to know that at least that part makes sense.

hi allyamber.

there's always a subconscious reason that alters present a certain way. maybe it's because you felt like a guy could protect you better, or because people that hurt you in the past were male, or you subconsciously see men as stronger and more protective. even if you consider yourself a feminist, things like this can still linger, and that's not a bad thing, especially if they were alters created during childhood, because most children are more focused on how they perceive the world and the people in it and how those people treat them.

if a child gets abused by men, they might have a negative association with men, causing male persecutors. alternatively, they might see men as strong because of it, and that might cause a male protector that they see as being strong enough to handle this male abuser.

all alters are based on subconscious views and perceptions. sometimes it's fun to think about how alters formed a certain way, i know i like to think about our alters and the subconscious perceptions they come from. maybe try to think about why a certain alter split and why they are the way they are based on subconscious perceptions and the events that caused them to split. if it's not too triggering, of course.

-Grem II(? not sure if it's Grem II or just grem, haha)

Thanks, gremandco. I've always felt kind of guilty that my subconscious responded that way, because I don't like contributing to gender stereotypes, but I also know that I didn't know any better as a kid and had no way of controlling how my brain split.

It definitely makes a lot of sense with my upbringing that we'd feel safer that way, for several reasons. I'm still working on figuring out all of the reasons for the traits that formed from splitting, hopefully going back to therapy will clear some of that up.

allyamber wrote:Thanks, gremandco. I've always felt kind of guilty that my subconscious responded that way, because I don't like contributing to gender stereotypes, but I also know that I didn't know any better as a kid and had no way of controlling how my brain split.

It definitely makes a lot of sense with my upbringing that we'd feel safer that way, for several reasons. I'm still working on figuring out all of the reasons for the traits that formed from splitting, hopefully going back to therapy will clear some of that up.

that sounds good, i'm glad you're going to work on it. i hope it goes well for you guys.

-grem

Thanks grem

Something I've thought about recently: I always thought that if I had an 'inner world' I must not have any access to it. I mean, I don't, currently. When the others take over, I either completely blank and don't remember any of it, or I am able to stay and watch, to different degrees. (Sometimes with some control, sometimes just stuck in the back of my head watching myself do things.)

When I was young, I had very vivid memories of going to the same apartment. I remembered a boy I would play with there. I went so many times that for a while I thought it must have been somewhere I lived. My family has said that there was no place that resembled it at all. Looking back, there were definitely some things that were 'off.' Basically, it seems a lot more like something a kid made up. For example, the boy somehow had a bunch of the same toys as me, and the way his bedroom was set up was odd. All of it could be possible, but I definitely lean toward it being something invented by a young child.

I also remember that the boy was often not in the room. I'd just play in there alone. That also strikes me as very strange. It's made me wonder if the boy was one of my parts who couldn't stay in the room because he was taking over, though that's just a theory.

There are many ways for an Innerworld to function and it evolves through time.

We too have reoccuring "memories" of the same place/s - some we know for sure come from dreams and others, we are not so sure though we know for certain it does not come from the physical world.

The way we experience the time spent in the Innerworld varies too. Here it what we experience.

Sometimes we do not remember at all what happened in the Innerworld. It's just, "I did this in the body, then others took over for a while, then I came back and I got filled in with what happened with the body when I was away".

Sometimes when we come back in front (in control of the body) we just "know" what we did in the Innerworld when we were away from the front.

Sometimes when we front we are more or less conscious of what others do in the Innerworld, as in some sort of afterthought. As an example, today we spent most of the day being aware that in the Innerworld, Zami and Ulysses were chatting about existentialism things (i.e. "what if we were self-aware Sims?" and other mind-twisters). We also most of the time can "see" Theia working like a buzy secretary with her cat eye shaped red glasses, sitting in her office, surrounded by piles of paperwork (it is an illustration of her job as a gatekeeper).

It really depends on the days.

Some systems do not have an Innerworld or barely any, others have a whole universe with different galaxies and star systems... And all the in-betweens and sideways exist.
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Uriel.

Sorry for the late reply, but thanks for the explanation on inner worlds! That's really helpful, I didn't know they could function like that.

I think I probably can't access it because I wasn't supposed to know--and I think maybe they weren't supposed to either? I get the impression that some of them don't really view this life as real/meaningful. I get very vivid and realistic flashes into what looks just like this world: I saw a clearing on the edge of the woods once, a winding highway another time, and then the apartment I remembered as a kid. I might be reading into it too much, I'm not really sure. It doesn't feel like daydreaming because it's much more vivid and I don't really have control over what I see--the road took turns whether I expected it to or not, for example--but I don't know if sometimes I just have very vivid daydreams. Either way, I don't really have a fleshed out life inside my head, which makes me kind of relieved but also kind of jealous, weirdly? That's probably unfair because I get most of the real world life, but sometimes I think I'd rather have a fleshed out daydream life. That's probably an escapism issue though.