Alter in love was a mystery to me

Una+, thank you for taking the time to reply in this form, I think we can all learn from your perspective on this (for the record, I asked Una’s advice on an issue I did not want to post in the forum for various reasons).

I thought about all you said and as ever you are making a lot of sense. When I compare your experience, mine and that of the many other posters who have been through here in the last six months with stories of how the multiple in their life is driving them nuts, the one thing that really jumps out at me is the issue of accountability, both within these guy’s systems and in their interactions with others.

When a person finds out they are a multiple, there are various ways to respond to that. The way that some of us choose (like you and me for example) is to take charge and do something about it, as a matter of course. Learn all we can, get ourselves into treatment, actively work on our issues and take responsibility for getting better. Whether that means that one alter takes responsibility for integrating the others, or a system takes responsibility for its collective actions, somewhere, somehow, accountability is assigned and accepted – not just for our own sake but also that of others around us. For me, this was the natural thing to do, and as far as I have read, for you also.

What it comes down to is that some multiples are not willing or able to accept that accountability. I really do not feel that we, multiples ourselves, have any need to treat them as poor disabled people or emotional basket-cases who simply cannot help themselves – not when we are dealing with the very same issues in a much more mature and responsible manner. As opposed to singletons, we know exactly what the deal is and what is and isn’t possible.

I very much resonate with your desire to help the man you know – it is nothing short of heart-wrenching to watch someone you love suffer, especially when some parts of them are so young, and not be able to help them. Also and especially when you know for pretty damn sure what it would take for them to heal, when you have come a long way on that path yourself and you know for a fact they could be better if they only cared to bloody well listen for five minutes. It’s like having to watch the same slow-motion car crash happen in front of your eyes over and over and not being able to stop it.

But regardless of what we know, no amount of goodwill and help can install a sense of accountability in a person, multiple or not. I think of accountability as more than just knowing who did what and why, or who is to blame – it is ultimately about a sense of moral responsibility, a working conscience translated into action. A sense of moral agency or lack thereof is not a matter of multiplicity vs singledom, rather some singletons and multiples have it and others don’t. A multiple who walks around refusing to own his/her crap, refusing to deal with his issues and rather inflicting it on everyone around them, has to learn that finding that sense of moral agency is not something that happens when you are cured, it IS the cure. I am quite convinced (if you’ll forgive a personal observation) that the reason you are on here, healing yourself, and the love that compels you to help that suffering other come from the same source, a source that he maybe still has to find in himself.

When I first left my ex over a year ago, I was glad to be rid of him and I could not make sense of that solitary tear running down my face as I sat on the bus because it sure as hell wasn’t me crying. These days now, I cry a lot, I cry when I see him and when he leaves, and I am not the least bit ashamed. These are my tears now, my sadness and pain and I own them like I own all of myself. I didn’t get to that point by asking other people to put up with my #######4, or telling myself I was a bad person only so I did not have to become someone better. I’m still far from being a saint, but I have come a long way. Unfortunately, no one can walk this way for anyone else, no matter how well they know the terrain.

Your husband sounds like an amazing human being. I am glad you have him in your life.

Best, t

Tribe and Una: your last two posts here have been incredibly inspiring and enlightening. While I've been trying as hard as I can to get better, I haven't tried to take charge of my own life, instead letting alters ruin valuable friendships with their (my?) mistakes. Thank you, truly, for your valuable insight.

-Jeff

This post concerns some of my experiences of coming out as a multiple. This post expands on some of my comments in a recent thread on this topic:

DID Forum: Revealing DID to a relationship prosect...help???

In coming out to coworkers and casual friends, as a rule I do not ever describe or even name the nature of my early childhood trauma that caused the DID. Even with some close friends I am silent about this. I am silent because I am aware that so many other persons are carrying their own unprocessed trauma and may experience any disclosure of my trauma as fresh trauma for them. They may be triggered in ways neither of us is prepared to deal with. For me, being a safe person for others means being mindful of the fact that others may be extremely vulnerable and I could harm them. Furthermore, I do not need to share details of my own trauma with them. I have a competent psychotherapist and a support network of older adults who are willing to hear those details and able to hear them without being traumatized. Vicarious trauma is real, and often unnecessary.

When I disclose (or "self report") I do share that I sometimes experience identity alteration and amnesia, separately and together, and because these experiences sometimes occur together I have a diagnosis of DID. This is my "coming out" disclosure in a nutshell.

If I am aware that in the past I have experienced symptoms or displayed signs of identity alteration and/or amnesia in the presence of the other person, I talk with them about that. This often is very constructive, healing past accidental wounds in the relationship.

For example, years ago I spent a very long and intense day with a colleague I had not met before. It was an experience most people would remember vividly. Post-diagnosis when I began making an inventory of my episodes of dissociative amnesia I became aware that I could remember working with someone new to me that day but I could not remember who it was. By process of elimination I figured out who it probably was. Then I saw the candidate person. He was a stranger to me, not familiar at all, but several times I saw him looking at me with a certain puzzled expression. Oh dear. I have seen that look before! That told me we had met before and he was trying not to feel hurt that I seemed not to know him. Recently I saw him again and this time I told him I thought he was the person I spent that day with. (That was a painfully embarrassing moment for me!) He agreed he was and we talked about our work that day. I apologized for not remembering him. I said I was not present that day. He said "Huh? Not present?" This tells me further disclosure may be helpful. Right then was not a good time for it, so I merely replied "My mind was elsewhere." I am sure this puzzled him because by any objective standard I was very much "all there" that day. Now I kind of do remember that it was him... or maybe I am fooling myself.

It really pisses me off that even now, approaching 3 years after becoming aware of my DID, I continue to meet new people who tell me we already met. Some are amused but others clearly are offended that I do not remember them. The thing is, my not remembering has little or nothing to do with them.

Now I am bringing these moments on myself more too, because I no longer pretend I know someone while I work out who they are. My usual tactic had been to greet new people without saying my name so that if we had met before I might avoid revealing that I thought we were meeting for the first time. If they told me their name or asked for my name, that suggested we actually were strangers. If they did not, that suggested we had met before and I needed to surreptitiously find out their name and how they knew me.

Tribeofone and Jeff (of TGFSmith), yes personal accountability is the key concept here.

My family of origin taught me denial, rugsweeping, suppression, conflict avoidance, evasion, the works. Most of all denial. Denial so deep and so systematic that I was forced to dissociate hide all "undesirable" aspects of myself: most of my emotions and many parts of my self. One of the family mantras was that we were better than other people because we knew not to ever air out our dirty laundry. Not in public, and not in the family either.

Somewhere along the way, however, I learned another way of living. I took charge of my life early, and left my family of origin. I learned to deal with all kinds of problems head on, to face them and solve them in constructive ways. My DID and my relationship with this other multiple are just two more problems that have surfaced and I am working through them.

I am surrounded by high functioning people like me. And among them I have encountered many high functioning multiples! My DID-dar works so well that I have stopped counting. These multiples range from unaware of their condition, to aware but deep in denial, to accepting but undiagnosed, to diagnosed but untreated, to in treatment, to fully integrated. All of them have a delicious "vibe", an amazing responsiveness and flexibility, uncanny empathy, and so on. Most of them make good use of their multiplicity in their careers, although for those who are less far along toward recovery sometimes the multiplicity also causes problems. Certainly they are suffering.

Among them, Alter 5's other man stands out. His system and mine somehow fit together in a way that feels... just wow. To me it feels like we switch together in a kind of interpersonal psychic dance, staying in synch with each other. No matter how ordinary and public our interaction is, it feels somehow very intimate, like making love. Even other people can see it; they can sense our connection. Being with him is very exciting... and exhausting.

[And, I might add: generally I do not enjoy this experience of intimacy. I hardly know this man and I did not ask to have this experience with him! It is something that just happens, whether I like it or not.]

My amazing husband in contrast is so stable that with him I am almost unable to switch. After spending time with Alter 5's man I enjoy the peace and calm of my husband all the more.

Now more than 3 months have passed since the spontaneous fusion of Alter 5 (girl in love with another man) and myself (Una). I have been working through the stages of grief as this part of me comes to terms with reality. Reality is that although she was derived from (made by) this other man, it is not possible for her to go back to him. She is forever a part of me, an unusual kind of love child. Mostly we have been working through anger and bargaining, with some brief depression. Acceptance is not yet in sight.

Looking back at my journal, I see that for more than a year she cried almost nightly "I love him" etc then for another year she cried "He doesn't know I exist". This was both a cry of pain and a defense against the even more painful idea that he rejected her. He certainly rejected me but she was holding onto the idea that because he doesn't know she exists his rejection does not apply to her.

Now I feel the loss, her loss as she struggles to accept that his rejection does apply to her, and it hurts. It is excruciating. And yet at the same time I feel in other parts of myself a curious hope and confidence. This story is not over yet.

This post is another long one. The topic is those two highly mysterious DID phenomena "fusion" and "integration", something I have been thinking and reading about lately as that is now where I am in my process.

In another recent thread here on the DID Forum I wrote

Una wrote:Greg, that is co-consciousness. My Alter 2 and I now do that a lot. He leans over my shoulder, watching and listening to everything and now and then commenting. I can feel him there, very close. Sometimes I can feel his feelings and I can almost hear his private thoughts. We are getting that close. When the time comes I think fusion will be easy but integration may take us a long time. Integration will take a long time because he has been awake and active separately from me for so many years.

Sometimes Alter 2 comments out loud, talking through me, right out of my mouth to another person. Usually what he says is vulgar (and out of character for me) and people around me appear shocked or disapproving of my "potty mouth." I am working on "owning" his behavior because in a sense it is my own behavior.

Re my aside about fusion and integration, lifelongthing asked:

lifelongthing wrote:

Una wrote:When the time comes I think fusion will be easy but integration may take us a long time.

Would you be able to explain the difference here? It's very interesting reading about your journey.

I will quote an expert on DID; see below.

In another recent thread here on the DID Forum I wrote

Una+ wrote:Tribeofone, you had a so-called "final fusion". Many final fusions don't hold together, so turn out to be not final and that is to be expected, but yours has held so you are ahead of the game. One rule of thumb circulating among DID therapists is that a final fusion that holds marks about the 70 percent point in therapy. There is much work to be done post-fusion to reach full integration.

I can relate to how transferable feelings are, when a DID system fuses. I have a somewhat similar problem. Before I fused Alter 1 I did not feel love for Alter 5's other man except during episodes of "co-consciousness crisis". And I did not feel in love with him either, except in moments when Alter 5 flooded me with her feelings. But now that I have fused both alters I have those feelings continuously. Happily, post fusion those feelings are not so concentrated and overwhelming. This is where the integration comes in. I personally have experienced this man as creepy, unattractive, sometimes actively hostile, and definitely not a safe person for us. Alter 2 is very angry about certain things this man has said and done. All those disparate, conflicting feelings and experiences need to be integrated into a whole picture and from that a unified course of action can be planned. The picture is a messy one.

I have just finished reading cover to cover for the second time Frank W. Putnam's 1989 book Diagnosis & Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. The first time I read it 2 years ago I paid most attention to the earlier chapters on history, phenomenology, and diagnosis. I read the last chapters quickly, with a sense of impatience and frustration bordering on despair. When will I ever get there, I wondered? Well, two years later I seem to have arrived there. This time the final chapter was by far the most interesting. The section titled "Therapeutic Resolution" mostly concerns fusion and integration. Here I quote from his book, omitting citations.

Putnam, page 301 wrote:The terms "fusion" and "integration" are often used synonymously to describe the unification of alter personalities into a single entity. Experienced therapists, however, often distinguish between these two events. Integration is understood to be a "more pervasive and thorough psychic restructuring," while fusion is seen as an initial "compacting" process that lays the groundwork for integration. From this perspective, fusion can be understood as the process of removing the dissociative barriers that segregate specific alters. Integration occurs over a period of weeks to months and produces a synthesis of the previously separate elements of each alter into a more unified global personality structure.

Putnam has some curious things to say about fusion, perhaps reflecting the fact that fusion is a highly subjective experience the non-multiple therapist cannot begin to experience for himself, only hear about and observe signs of after the fact.

Putnam, page 308-9 wrote:I do not know what fusion is or is about. At times I find myself quite skeptical of the process and wonder whether we have bought into a magical expectation about treatment outcome. Everything we know about developmental psychopathological processes would suggest that the early trauma suffered by these patients has irreparably damaged them, so that a unified sense of self would be impossible to achieve in later adult life. Yet I have seen some patients undergo a transformation over the course of treatment, so that the alter personalities lose their separateness and appear to be absorbed into a more integrated sense of self.

My own first subjective experience of fusion came very early in treatment before I had read or been told anything about it. It was a very sudden and dramatic singular event, completely unexpected and quite a shocking experience for me. It was presaged by an equally dramatic and profound dream I had after my first or second session of therapy, many months before I learned anything about my diagnosis or DID. So I can attest that fusion of alters is real. Fusion is not in any way a product of magical thinking, not a false expectation. It is a natural, albeit unusual, human experience of profound change.

Thank you Una+. You're always very helpful

It has been more than a year since the last time I experienced a command hallucination. The last experience was a deep booming male Voice of God, very loud and psychologically overpowering, ordering me to Talk to [him], referring to the man Alter 5 longed for. I asked the Voice What should I tell him? The Voice did not answer. After much soul searching and consultation with my therapist I did not talk to the man.

Often in bed at night as I drift off to sleep and again in the early morning as I wake my system holds an internal conference. During last night's conference we were mulling over the past year and got to thinking about this command hallucination. When is the Voice of God not really God, but only an impostor? How can I know the difference? I began to cry and I asked God

God, if this was you, then why me? Why do you give me these painful messages for this man I hardly know? Why do you tell me to talk to him?

And this time I got an answer. In my mind suddenly a new voice spoke quietly and calmly but very clearly. The voice said

Because you love him.

When it rains it pours...

So after hearing the new voice say, apparently, that I receive messages for Alter 5's man and commands about speaking to him because I love him, the following day I began once again fretting over what to say to him. What to say? What?! I am so frustrated; this has been going on for 3 years now. As usually happens at this point I burst into tears. Then suddenly I heard the new voice speaking again, and the voice said:

You don't have to worry about that.

An indescribable feeling of peace and relaxation passed through me and I stopped crying. I don't have to worry about what to say? I am still thinking about that one.

It sounds distressing in ways to be so connected to this man without having an actual connection. Hopefully this new alter can help put what pieces are not together, together.