Innocent people who activate our alters

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack your thread.

I'll PM you some more about it, Una+.

under ice wrote:What about fear? If I get an extreme fear reaction and a strong urge to protect myself from someone although they've never threatened me or anything, can that be an alter reacting? It hasn't happened to me many times, maybe twice or so but it's confusing as hell.

Yes, that could be an alter (or you, unconsciously) experiencing a transference.

I think what happened in my case is that the man somehow activated my system, waking several alters. I experienced overwhelming infatuation (Alter 1) and almost equally overwhelming fear (Alter 2? another?). Even my fragment Teen Girl awakened to him; she had not been out for 30 years. I started recording a trigger inventory and journaling, and gradually it became apparent that this one man presents two separate triggers.

(A) His vehicle. The one time I was in it, it was ultra clean. An ultra clean vehicle reminds me of a traumatic event when I was 16, at the hands of someone who was extremely compulsive. I realized this after I subsequently had a panic attack while a passenger in another man's ultra clean vehicle. Now that I have figured it out, I think this trigger is unlikely to bother me much anymore.

(B) His clothing. He favors soft, plush clothes. Someone I knew in my teens was like that, but I didn't feel any special attachment to that person until I saw a photo of him wearing a puffy down jacket. With the current man, by far my most extreme feelings in his presence occurred when I saw him wearing a similar jacket.

Neither of these triggering was evident when I first encountered the man and my alters woke up, though, so these triggers do not explain why that happened.

I realized today that perhaps R has been in charge of attraction in my adult life.
This thought is only in formation because it's new.

I met someone today who stirred something in me, which hasn't happened for a very, very long time, and due to it I noticed a couple of things that helped me to remember a lot of things from the previous times. Like: when I become romantically interested in a guy, I feel that I get an urge to behave more masculinely than normally, and I automatically start looking for similarities in our 'masculinity'. This has been unconscious for me until now, but it's as clear as day, even disregarding the transgender phase during the months when R was closer to the front. When I have a crush on someone, I actually identify with the female gender or femininity less than normally, and I can remember feeling like being in a young man's body in the way I move and just generally do things.
Moreover, as I just lay on the sofa wondering about the guy I met today, I decided to ask R what he thought of him. Although R has surfaced a couple of times in the last three months, I've been unable to get in touch with him on will; now, however, he immediately told me he likes the guy and made me feel warm and snuggly.. I mean, that was HIS feeling that I know from before. He has this incredibly soft presence when he's happy!

-- Tue Jul 12, 2011 8:24 pm --

I assume that problems always arise since we're so different. He's sweet and innocent in love, I'm cynical and more reserved, and so on. I think he sends out the cute signals without me knowing of it. I mean, someone has to do it and it's not me!

The problem in every relationship from the very start is that I have 'wakenings' when I suddenly see everything differently and ask, why am I here, this guy is not interested in me but someone else who looks like me (one of my most usual thoughts in the beginning of a relatioship -- crazy), what does he want of me?! I suppose this also eventually spoils sex because one of us (?) gets flashbacks or something.

Under ice, your situation sounds like a recipe for confusion for everyone involved, if unaware. Good for you, not only being aware but being able to communicate with R! I'm sorry I don't know your history: were the previous attractions before you discovered R?

Yes Una, I suppose that R was involved in some of my crushes before I became aware of him, more or less. Especially my longest relationship, which gave me PTSD symptoms from the very beginning . I don't know if it matters at all, but my partner turned out to be confused about his own sexual orientation, in other words, he was hyper masculine and did his best to repress his bisexuality. But that was just him, not me; at any rate, when we were close to break-up he used to repeatedly say that I'm 'not the same person' he started to date with. But here I go again connecting things that necessarily have nothing to do with each other. It's so easy to make a whole narrative out of little things like that.

When I think of my adolescence, I have to be careful not to confuse the fact that I've 'always' wanted to do also boy things with the feeling that some of that was perhaps caused by a male alter or alters. I might have mentioned that when I was two - three I planned to become a 'big man' when I was angry and wanted revenge, and when I was in a good mood I called myself a 'sailor boy'. Come to think of it, the girl and boy sides of me used to exist always side by side, and when I reached my teens it became painful that I was just a girl to everyone, when I didn't quite feel like one. Until I was twenty, I was frequently mistaken as a boy by grown-up men who didn't know me. That didn't make me feel glad, just freakish. For a long time I was just frozen, I was nothing ... at least nothing specific, although I had strong sexual feelings and emotions towards boys. Perhaps I was emotionally like a homosexual boy in a closet? A funny coincidence, four of my closest male friends in my teens are nowadays openly gay, and they all had a crush on me for some time.

Well, I think I could go on and on with this sort of monologue. But the funny thing is that when R finally came out almost six years ago, I felt that he balanced things out a lot. I could address much of the masculine stuff that had existed without no understandable source 'back' to him, and in return he reminded me of my own sensitivity by making me experience emotions that had been somewhere in the background for a long time. In a way he is more feminine than me, especially when it comes to how he wants to look like, dress up and so on .

If I ever fall in love again, the questions will be: are we both in love, and if it's only him (a more likely scenario), will I spoil it for us? Today for instance R has been away all day, and I can't get in touch with my yesterday's romantic vibe at all. There's none.

Many years ago I told a very intimate friend that I feel like I am a homosexual man in a woman's body. My friend, a bisexual man, replied that may be why he finds me so hot. I don't feel a need to change my own sex, but I do not fit in with women. I never liked to play with dolls; that felt yucky.

Exactly .
I liked to play with little dolls. I took care of them and made homes for them for all my childhood, even though I also liked to watch football matches on television when I was home alone. My parents idiotically gave my most beloved doll to a smaller child when I was four. Because they said it was too childish for me to play with it! I was heartbroken... and still am a little. I hated Barbie dolls.