The Road Goes Ever, Ever On (Theta's Journey)

spinningtops wrote:I am sorry you are feeling inadequate cause of the disorder. I get that. There are many things that can be harder and it is frustrating and easy to feel down about. I hope that you can learn the game that other parts have learned.

Thank you. I've mostly relearned what the others knew. It's just frustrating and difficult at times being beholden to all the trauma and all the other issues. Not knowing information because others knew and hold it even if it's fairly simple things is getting frustrating. It makes it difficult some days to just feel adequate for anything.

TheTriForce wrote:

ViTheta wrote:We've been going through a period of time of shame over our DID and trauma. We want to participate with others and be on their level in our games, but it's a struggle since the 'easy' path requires playing a male character in missions.

What game is it? Can you not customise your character at all? (you say the 'easy way' is a male character suggesting there is a female or customisable option?)

It's a game called Warframe. 97% of the game can be played with a female character, but there's this one section of rotating missions which can't be. It isn't necessary to do them for game progression. It just helps make things easier.

We did play Red Dead Online, btw, and there you can customize your character, but you have to have friends to do the story missions.

We've realized how sensitive we are with regards to our feelings of not being heard or understood, and so much of what's been going on lately is tied into this. We made an appointment with a clinic to discuss nutrition and weight loss, but they've put us onto the track for surgery to help with the weight loss "in case we decide to go that direction." When we've tried to explain that we don't know when we're hungry or full from eating, that gets ignored. We're concerned and upset over whether or not they'll listen to us during the appointment.

Lately one of our friend group has been misunderstanding what we're trying to say sometimes and we keep upsetting them or getting into arguments that upsets people and that ends up feeding back into us. Somewhere between the autism, ADHD and DID, it feels like our emotions are hard to regulate and we just get badly upset.

Thank you both for the reply.
Violette

ViTheta wrote:
We did play Red Dead Online, btw, and there you can customize your character, but you have to have friends to do the story missions.

oh didn't realise it was online only! ... We tend to buy on cartridge and play offline as our internet connection is too slow out here for streaming stuff live from servers,...so didn't bother paying for the online subscription. It takes all night to just download a small game when we do get one from eshop for LS! We only get them on sale there as can't resell digital copies, unless its something we know we will use regularly like the yoga one!

Suki

TheTriForce wrote:

ViTheta wrote:
We did play Red Dead Online, btw, and there you can customize your character, but you have to have friends to do the story missions.

oh didn't realise it was online only! ... We tend to buy on cartridge and play offline as our internet connection is too slow out here for streaming stuff live from servers,...so didn't bother paying for the online subscription. It takes all night to just download a small game when we do get one from eshop for LS! We only get them on sale there as can't resell digital copies, unless its something we know we will use regularly like the yoga one!

Suki

Certainly understand that. It's been fun to go into the online world and just play calmly for us.

Take care,
Violette

Things are quiet inside right now, but that might be mostly because we're working on getting our space resettled and reorganized. Pretty soon, things will be set up better. Our typewriter is now set up again and we've been working towards getting more things set up better.

Yesterday, we completely closed off our former friend LB's means of communicating with us. We realized that she was not only being abusive towards us (and our friends LR and EW), but she had been abusive towards the children in her care. Those children have gone back to their mother, but that situation appears to be much better now that their mother has stopped running away from her sexuality. She has a girlfriend and they're raising the children as a couple now. It's wonderful to see that happening.

We also realized in therapy how manipulative our Aunt P was. It is kind of hard to explain, but she did everything she could to be the 'center of the web' in the family, and we started piecing together (with our sister) that she may have actually been keeping our mom and our Aunt A from reconciling. Our cousin J also tried to do this, but ran into the fact that we had already created communication lines between us and our sister. Our Aunt P was also notorious about gaslighting us, and we think she may have figured out about the DID.

The cleaning is helping us feel better. We've bought posters to go on the wall. In the end, we're going to set things up to be for us.

Take care,
Violette

Hi. This is Lilith.

I know I haven't written much in a while. With everything going on, I haven't been comfortable fronting; however, I've started to remember a few things and I needed to share here.

Trigger Warning For Sexual Assault

I've been having flashes of a man with an old style polaroid camera. He's the same man as before. Outside is the same field I see from the sliding glass doors in the dining room. The tall grasses are all brown. He's taking pictures of me naked. I want to cry.

Trigger Warning Ends.

I realized I typed 'share' instead of 'record'. I meant to write record.

So, I've pieced more together about what happened. This lead to panic last night, but things are calmer today. I'm not going to go into details. We'll be ok. I know we will be. It's just going to be a while.

Lilith

So...therapy went well today. And maybe I'm willing to talk about it here a bit more and record everything.

Warning for Sexual Abuse

So...we now have a name for the man who abused us. Just his first name. We don't know his last and none of us seem to have any idea of what it was. It's probable that we never knew.

But what we now know is that this man, M, took pictures with an old polaroid camera. He had pictures of other children too. Most of the worst abuses seemed to happen during sleep overs at our friend CB's apartment where M gave us wine while CB's mom was away at work.

Our aunt told us that we used to stay at her apartment when our mom and dad were fighting or trying to work on their marriage. We would wake up in the middle of the night and go to our apartment even curling up at the door and sleeping until morning. This was probably not a great idea given the climate where we lived, but we stopped wanting to have sleep overs at any of our friend's houses even going forward. We never slept under a different roof than our family until college, from what I can remember.

We know that part of it was the autism, but I remember being so afraid of not being in my own room.

The pictures are probably long gone now. A blessing of living in the era before any of those images could have been downloaded into the internet. We hope that the photos were destroyed at some point.

But all of this...we hate wine. We made excuses to not drink it...lots of excuses. The only times we've drunk wine allowed Marcus to get close enough to the surface that we were afraid he'd do something really bad. It also explains why we reacted so badly to CB talking about how he would show off pictures of his 'best friend' to people.
End Trigger Warning

Thank you for reading. Thank you even if you didn't.
Lilith.

That's awful but as you say it was thankfully in an era before the internet and hopefully the photo's are long gone.

I'm glad you have access to a therapist to talk about it. We always read your journal posts (and other peoples on here) you have all helped Bobby to understand that 'medical trauma' is not the same as other kinds of abuse - Jay

Thank you. Our T has been such a blessing. She's also been patient given that we're not going to be pushing to heal the trauma and letting it get better when it's time.

Also, don't just brush off the medical trauma just because it wasn't like some of the traumas others have gone through. Trauma is trauma, and if you're autistic, it can be just as traumatic to have all those medical things done to you as what happened to us.

Trauma is still trauma, and if it was bad enough to cause DID or OSDD, then it was bad. We just have different journeys to travel for healing.

Take care,
Lilith