Selves Expression

Last week in therapy I had to run to the bathroom to be sick. Nothing came up but the urge to retch was overwhelming.  This doesn't sound like an amazing event or even something to be pleased about but actually it was amazing for two really big reasons.

Firstly I have lived my full four decades of live terrified of being sick. From about the age of 10 and until maybe 3 years ago I always, always faint if I am sick.  As a teenager I once fell off the toilet and badly damaged my foot when I began to feel sick. When I was 18 I had to go to hospital in an ambulance because I fainted on a bus (due to feeling sick/diarrhoea and having stomach pains) and the doctors were convinced I was having an ectopic pregnancy.  As an adult I've become more and more afraid of being sick because I know it will trigger feelings that I can't bear and that I will then dissociate from by fainting.  So....  when I was in my session and my body wanted to retch and yet didn't want to faint some part of me watched on in wonder. 

The other reason I think it was amazing is that I am excessively inhibited when it comes to expressing my young selves - or in fact any of my other selves - in therapy. The angry ones and the good ones come out fairly easily but that's about it.  I've read blogs, books and posts where people describe switching in therapy that leads to them expressing extreme emotions, such as curling up on the floor, screaming, being sick etc and I've always felt there was something wrong with me that I am so contained and silent in therapy.  Why am I so still, so  repressed? Does it mean I don't really have DID? I torment myself with these thoughts but of course that's not the reason. I DO have DID. I know that I do, and last week when Someone ( I will get to a real name for her soon) and Petra showed their pain and horror through my body, and that it was visible to my therapist I knew something was changing inside me. 

The session had started with me dissociating and losing some time - this too rarely happens to me, I am hyper, hyper vigilant and it keeps me very present most of the time. I've been trying for months, years even to try and make sense of how I can be so present due to hyper vigilance as well as being dissociated and finally it's beginning to make sense to me.

My mother I think is the key to understanding it. I was abused by my step father, other family members and a group of men who ritually abused me. Most of the ritual stuff happened when I was 5-7 years old. After that we moved and I was abused mostly in the home until my step father died when i was a teenager.  But my mother was always there, watching me, invading me, controlling me, and I felt she actually lived inside my head until i reached my mid 20's. The abuse I experienced was kept entirely away from my conscious mind. I had tried to tell my mother some things as a child but she didn't want to know and I knew with every ounce of my selves that I could not speak of it. In fact she insisted that I love and revere my step father.

She controlled every aspect of my life, how I expressed my feelings, how I dressed, when I cried, who my boyfriend was - everything.  She read my mail, prevented me from having friends and used me as a surrogate husband. Somehow ( and I still wonder about how) she managed to silence me and keep me silent until I was 24.  Living with her was like being brainwashed. Only certain thoughts and feelings were acceptable.

It's taken me a long time to realise I have DID and to accept that I always had it but that it was on the inside of me.  I switched internally frequently as a child and a teenager but what was visible on the outside was constant- it had to be. Two maybe three alters lived alongside me and presented a face to the world, they were the good ones, the ones who tried to love her and my step father, who believed what they were told and who tried to be what they wanted. If they failed and I veered from the family script then she began to emotionally abuse me, to castigate me for having needs, to tell me over and over how selfish and self absorbed i was, how unloving i was, how self indulgent I was.

When alone some others would surface but never with other people.   I had to survive living with a woman who constantly threatened suicide and who hated my brother. The house was full of violence and misery and it was my job to mop it all up and make it okay.  My selves (all buried deep inside) had no self expression at all.   Self harming would have been a step up for us, rebellion, anger would have been a freedom we couldn't risk without fear of annihilation.

Inside I have parts that want to cut, that want to throw up everything we eat, that want to be violent, aggressive and reckless. But they are all inside and not outside. To express such emotion still feels to be self -indulgence. Logically I know it isn't but any self expression feels so wrong.  As a child if any memories or feelings I couldn't cope with were triggered  we fainted and left that way. It was the only way we could leave the place we were in. The only self expression we had. 

So retching without fainting?  I'm pleased in a strange way.  Something that happened to me makes me want to be sick. I've always known that on some level.  I want to get something outside of me. Someone is telling me this and finally I can try to listen and finally I can stay to hear it.

Being Silenced

I don't know if this is just me or if most people with DID and a history of sexual abuse feel like this but I have days, weeks even when I feel unable to move and unable to speak. It's as though any movement at all feels too risky. I don't want to talk to anyone, don't want to blog, don't want to interact on any level, I just want to sit and do predictable things like eating the same food, watching repeats on the telly, reading the same books. I just want to escape  the world and stop it from moving because I can't keep up and if I can't keep up I can't stay safe.

I'm sure some of it is to do with Someone and other very young parts of me who's senses were overloaded and overwhelmed.  She shuts me down, prevents me from speaking or causing any ripples at all just in case there is a bad reaction from others, just in case she reactivates the abuse. It all went so horribly wrong for her. She did things she thought were right and they weren't. She did what they wanted her to do (the abusers) because she thought it would keep her safe but it wasn't safe, it was terrible.

In a way blogging is anonymous - just a voice into a big space which might be empty or might not be. I worry of course about the people who might read it and discredit me for daring to assert that I have DID but I also fear the people who might read it and hear me, who might connect in some way with my reality.

It is as hard to be heard as it is not to be heard.  I'm living with these two extremes and when i write I feel like I'm doing it through a fog but when i don't write I feel alone and silenced.

I can't bear to be silenced anymore - to be apologetic about myselves and who i am.  But oh my god the pain of pushing on and writing when i feel so dead inside is really, really hard as well.

None of it's easy - life with DID can be really, really shit!!

Eating, Crying and Quietly Dying

Eating :    It's all I do. it numbs the pain that is too big to stand.

Crying:    Mostly I don't. Then when I do it rips out my insides.

Quietly Dying:  She can't stand it. Someone can't stand it where she is. She wants to be snuffed out.

Trying to Move

The last week has been horrible and what I'm going to write is definitely triggering so please don't read on if you're feeling shaky or vulnerable.

The memories that have been rearing up at me are horrifying to my conscious mind. I keep them pushed down and away from me all the time but everyday they are there wanting to be heard, to be felt and accepted.

I am back to living in two time streams, both bleeding into one another to disastrous effect.  Driving is hazardous, being in groups (which I had to be at work this week) makes me shaky and disoriented, so I'm tripping over chairs and spilling my coffee. It's embarrassing - probably not bad enough for others to notice but bad enough for me to feel as though I am trying to hold down a hot air balloon with no ropes. I float out of my body almost entirely.  I don't want to be in it, because Someone is there ( a 5 year old girl) and in her time stream we are locked in a box with a bloody, mutilated child , trying not to breathe, trying not to move, trying to be dead.

I've known this for a long time.  But since my father wrote and called me a liar, discredited me in every way he could I've disowned this memory just as thoroughly as he has disowned me.  I don't completely understand why but I think I'm trying to protect myself.

He knew the majority of what happened to me. He saw some of my journals, my paintings, my writing, he heard me telling him and through all these things he Believed Me.   Now he doesn't and i don't know why he's stopped. I think because I've made him angry, because I've not been grateful for his occasional interest and care because he can't make it better and I'm not interested in letting him try. Because I've dared to be angry with him for leaving me to grow up with a paedophile. for expecting him to love me as i am and not expecting me to be the woman i would have been without the abuse.

I hate him, with every fibre of my being for what he's done to me and yet I've been denying my own truth in much the way he has denied me.

But I have to stop.  And Petra is helping me.

Someone is lost

Someone is lost.

The Snake and the Jailor

Today I want to write about the thinks that I turn away from. It’s so easy to kid myself that I’m together and sorted; in fact the longer I live with DID the better I become at showing only one face to the world. When I was younger all was chaos, flashbacks, triggers and terror. Now my older alters are mostly in control. They’re not daft, in fact they range from smart, logical and driven to accommodating, caring and diligent and between them they rustle up a life. 

But that’s as long as younger parts aren’t around.

And right now what I’m turning away from is a part of me that is in the shadows. I don’t know who she is but I’ve lived with her for as long as I can remember.  She is full of bleak, black thoughts that drag on the body  making it hard sometimes to even lift up my head. She doesn’t want to get up in the morning, or wash her hair, clean her teeth. She stops me doing good things for myself and even getting dressed is an ordeal.

I feel her as a burden but that seems so harsh.  I know she is hurting, sometimes she sinks to the floor and just cries when faced with anything dirty, like unwashed worktops and dirty pots.  Today as I washed up someone started yelling at her, demanding that she stop preventing me from keeping the house clean and tidy. That she just get over herself and stop being such a pain.  As soon as I shouted at her I felt better and then immediately ashamed.  It brought me back to something I was wrestling with in therapy last year that I described as the Jailor and Snake.

I don’t think of either as alters although I really don’t know if that’s right.

The snake is viscous, scathing and critical, ready to pull me down on every single thing I do.  The Jailor wants me to stay silent, to be boxed up and without a voice.

I suppose that’s why I’m writing a blog in the first place; to challenge the Jailor and to start existing outside of my box. Trying to bypass the constant stream of criticism in my head is almost impossible though.

But are they alters or just my internalised parents? My mother was a snake – a venomous woman who controlled my every move and my step father was the consummate jailor – silencing me, making me endure the most hideous things without moving or uttering a sound.

But how do I shut them up? And what do they have to do with the girl in the shadows?  Is she just the girl who put up with them? Accepted the criticism and abuse without uttering a sound, who tried to cope with no outlet for her emotions and no-one to help her feel better? I just don’t know….

Edie's View

Edie is not too impressed with the last post - far too adult. So I'm going to post something she wrote last year before my father landed a nail bomb on us! Edie was just coming out at that time and is just feeling now that she is able to come out again. this is how she came into being. I've had to use initials for lots of the parts as they don't feel comfy sharing their names here.

Edie’s story:

            I remember that it was cold in the bedroom after they dropped us off. It was late and very, very dark. They felt cold, the others,  their skin that had burned before was shivery now, huddled under the covers, slightly wet from the hosing down.  There was nobody around. He had gone to the big, dark bedroom next door and fallen asleep. We  were awake. R and S were laid out before me, there eyes dark, sunken in their white bone faces. What they’d gone through was wordless, it sat in their eyes like a black hole, turbulent and raging. By morning it would have mellowed to a stagnant pool of blackness. Well, that’s how Archi describes it anyway - to me they just seemed nearly dead.

I know it must seem weird, me talking about them as if they are not me and I am not them but that’s how it feels.  I was floating above them, rising up and away from them so that somebody was on the outside. What they felt was unbearable, I didn’t want to be in it, I wanted to be on the other side of their skin.  I had to be on the other side of it to help them. I wanted to help them but I didn’t want to be  them.

Eventually they fell asleep. There are others who help us in these sorts of situations. Shush is great at getting us to sleep- she shuts her eyes and it’s like a blanket of anaesthetic settling right around us. Only Nightowl can resist Shush and sometimes she does it with a dogged determination and we sit awake until 4 or 5am refusing to forget.  But I don’t think she knows why she is doing it and we just get very upset and tired.  Maybe she just wants us to remember that there are other feelings even if they are unbearable. This night Shush was still finding her strength and it was a while before we did get to sleep. It was in the time after S and R were laid on the bed, shivering and  before sleep that I realised I was needed. We needed a skin, not the skin we all shared but another skin, on the outside of that. I would live in the space between the first skin and the second skin filtering what came from outside and I would send all the good things inward.

There was no one to comfort R and S. I could see that; no adult was going to be there to hold them and make it better. J (mother) was worse than useless. All she wanted to hear was that we loved him. She didn’t want to know anything else.  He  did hug us sometimes, soothe us and make us feel safe again, but he also made us take the blame. I didn’t like him and I didn’t want R and S or any of the others  relying on him.

I don’t think I planned how it would all work – at least not then. All that I’ve told you was like instinct, the gut instinct of a 5 or 6  year old girl. It’s not a choice splitting away from the main body. It doesn’t work like that. It’s more a survival thing – a child can’t cope without love, without comfort or without a way to change bad feelings into good feelings. Archi knows more about these things than me. All I know is how it feels.

I didn’t know what was going to work to help them but then the next morning as we sat opposite him  in our school uniform befuddled and cold on the inside, I saw the toast sitting on the table. He kept looking at us and S and R were trying their very best to be invisible to stay behind their skin.  The toast was warm and sweet. I knew it would taste nice. The tension of sitting opposite him was getting too much for S and R- they began to be visible, not just in the eyes but on the outside. Tears were coming, they might even begin to tremble or worse still one day they might shout. I grabbed the toast and sunk in my teeth.  The sweetest sensation came over us as it filled my mouth and slid gently down my throat. It landed like a pool of heat in my cold tummy.  I took another bite and another bite – as many as it took to prolong that feeling of being embraced on the inside where R and S were huddled in their broken selves. They were grateful, so grateful for the sweet, buttery lifeline and like a full well fed baby they finally sank quietly away. They stayed on the inside of our skin and we were safe again.

It didn’t take long for me to be relied upon. It wasn’t only S and R that needed me, the others began to seek my help as well. I was really useful for the ones that felt angry – like P and M, S too.  There was nowhere for them to ‘be’. Nowhere at all and somehow we had to make all that angry bearable. The same with CC and GGJ – it wasn’t so simple with them. They had to be good  and accepting of things that really were unbearable.

 I think of our insides  like a rope. GGJ, D and CC for instance are at the end of the rope, very near the surface, the outside.  They are a long way from anger. They are concerned with staying safe – very safe and they don’t rock the boat. They have to swallow lots and lots of things, they have to pretend they have no feelings of their own. They have to do what others want, they have to submit. But if you stand behind them with your back to their back and look deep down inside us you will see the others – A, M, P, S, raging away like mini tornados. They are a problem, they are all a problem I suppose. Children aren’t meant to be the way we are. All split up into pieces, with different jobs and no way of talking to each other. Living without adults. I’m everywhere, plugging holes, soothing hurts, giving purpose and hope. I’m a nurse with no bandages but I do my best.

The hardest thing is that so many of them hate me. They give me their anger and their shame; their needs and their despair and I give them some warm, familiar comfort; a bar of chocolate, a routine of food a chance to forget for a while the pain they feel. I refuse to be starved – I get very angry if food is taken away from us.  It helps them because it gives some order to the chaos, it gives N something to hold on to, to look forward to, it fills up A’s gaping stomach that longs to be touched and accepted. I give GGJ fuel so she can keep meeting the needs of others which makes her feel safer and I offer the angry ones a chance to change their anger into hunger. If they take the exchange I can give them food and they feel full and forget they are angry.

It’s just that those feelings have not really gone away. I am still holding them, carrying them on my back like an overburdened donkey.  Nobody wants me because I am covered in dirty sticky feelings that they all want to disown. I am fat and the body I use is failing. It seems impossible for the others to accept the body; they rage at me for what I have done to it, but really it wasn’t just me. It was them too. If I’m not going to hurt the body then they will have to feel some of their own feelings.

Hurricane Reality

It's now February and still I'm reeling from the onslaught of reality I had to face in 2011.

This time last year I was off sick with - well I don't know what with really. Depression never seemed the right word, anxiety; whilst a reasonable description of what I was feeling whilst at work didn't adequately describe what it is like for work to be causing flashbacks and terror in child parts who were ill equipped to cope with the adult demands of my job.  In the end my sick notes ranged from depression to anxiety to PTSD, but whatever the label what I was actually facing was that I could no longer deal with Safeguarding issues in my job and if i couldn't do that was there even a job for me?

In the end there was half a job - I was redeployed at about the time my partner lost her contract and we went into financial meltdown.  It hasn't really turned a corner yet and I'm faced with the reality that what happened to me in the first 18 years of my life may never stop effecting my work life, or my capacity to earn money and enjoy a secure life.  I hate the constant worry, the constant reminder that I was abused to such a degree that it stops me from working as much as I really feel I should. The loss I felt was so severe when I learnt they would only employ me for half a week that I still haven't got over it.  I don't know what the future holds for me but I do know that I'm living with my eyes open to the truth of my life and I really don't like it. I just feel bereft, a victim who can't fight back hard enough to save herself. It feels like they ( my abusers) have won a victory over me and I can't stand it!

Then later in the year my Father ( who I didn't live with as a child) wrote to tell me that I was hurting everybody in the family because I won't pretend i wasn't abused, that I was terrible at my job,  mentally ill and that my accusations against my abusers were a manifestation of my illness (DID). He also threatened to go to the police and tell them all the things I had told him about my experiences  unless I agreed to go in the next 2 weeks and do it myself to prove to the family that I wasn't just making it all up.  He did all this - as far as I can see-  because my step brother (who is the son of my step father/ abuser) was upset by my allegations and how I had branded his father ,who is now dead, as a paedophile.   The worst thing was that I haven't had contact with any of my family (except him) for probably 3,4 years. I wasn't doing anything except trying to get by on my own, to survive.

As i write that I feel quite adult and see it as almost ludicrous but in reality it was a bit like having my head rammed against a wall repeatedly. It's 4 months now since he did it and some days the pain of it is unbearable. I (or someone much younger than me) sits on the floor and cries wondering why he wants to be so cruel to me.  For about a year he was with me, on my side but when he turned he included all my family in  listing how I had hurt them, let them down in ways he could only have known by talking to them about me. With that one letter I felt I had become a true orphan.  In reality I already was one but now I have it in black and white.

2011 was a shit, shit year in my life and now in February 2012 I'm still trying to accept it all, to stop fighting battles I can't win and it hurts, everyday it hurts.

Getting Started

I’ve always loved poppies. Their ability to produce such a fragile and beautiful flower whilst living on inhospitable waste land helps me to hope. For anyone who’s known trauma in childhood life can feel like a fight against the odds. Dissociative identity disorder can feel like part of the problem rather than the ingenious solution that it is to horrors too extreme for a child to bear.  In the last 3 to 4 years I have crept towards accepting that I have DID.  Previously I have been  far more comfortable with saying I had complex PTSD. But that was only part of the story. In reality it is one body, a plethora of others, or parts as I mostly call them, rising and retreating within me.

     I love to write and have reams and reams of journals stuffed in my cupboard crammed with my thoughts, feelings and memories. They document my life as a survivor of what I would call extreme sexual abuse (sometimes I use the term Ritual abuse too but it seems to make what was basically depraved men ruining my life sound posh) and when I prefer to forget the journals remind me that it did happen to me and that one of the consequences of that is that I am a person with a dissociative identity.

    It’s impossible to have the experiences I have had and be unaffected (believe me I’ve tried!). At the darkest times of my life I could probably not have countenanced writing a blog. Healing of the worst injuries is best done in a quiet protected space, but life is a little different now. I’m beginning to look outwards again and make sense of why my life feels so often to be a life interrupted. For me that one phrase describes how my life as a survivor with DID feels. I set off in one direction confident that I am doing what I want to do only to find hours or days later that someone else comes up to join me and the world changes colour and shape and I set off in another direction. Obviously direction is a metaphor for just about anything, going to the gym, starting a hobby, changing my job, having my hair cut, reading a newspaper. I set out sure that this time exercise will become a habit, that I definitely want my hair short, that my weekend subscription to the newspaper is not a waste of money only to find a week later I can’t remember the feelings or the drive that accompanied any of those actions or decisions. I don’t want to go to the gym (I hate exercise), I wish my hair was longer (it makes my face look fat when it’s short) and I don’t want to read the paper (who can escape into a newspaper?!). Hence, a life interrupted as someone else comes up from the dark and needs time, attention and space to breathe, who knows what is needed to feel better and it’s not the same as everyone else.

    That’s mostly what DID is like for me – I’m usually around- hardly anyone would know, or does know that I have it, and one or more others come and share life with me taking over to varying degrees but never to the degree that I lose time. Each wants to direct, enjoy or hate life on their own terms with their own pain and hurt, with me trying to remember the views and feelings of the parts that were there the day before and who I know will be back again. Like a complicated maths equation I try to make decisions that benefit everybody but so rarely make anybody that happy.

    Will writing this blog be like that? A good idea today but not so good next week. The truth is I don’t know. So this was written a month ago to test the idea out, let any objections be registered. The desire to write is one constant in my life. Most of us  like doing it but a few don’t and when they are uppermost I am likely to withdraw. Best to be honest about that I think!  But I’m also pretty sure I (or someone) will come back ready to talk again. Already I can feel the pull between those who want to talk about DID and those who want to talk about sexual abuse. Both matter, because both are my reality and I hope to make room for both.

    Anyway that’s a start I think. I haven’t said much concrete about myself have I? Well a few facts then to finish off:

-         I’m in my very late 30’s and live with my partner J (who is female, like me)

-         I work for a charity as a social worker. (More part time than I would like but more about that another time.)

-         I have pets, two adorable dogs, Little L and Big L and a lovely cat who wishes she didn’t live with 2 dogs!

-         I’ve been seeing my current psychotherapist for about 2 ½ years now after my previous therapist, who I saw for 14 years, died of cancer.