Am I Reality? and What Not to Disclose to Your Therapist!

An amalgam of three days of journal writing

Our purpose here is to figure out two things:  1) how to nurture our angry protector Tina 2) Therapist mentioned that we need acceptance.  Figure out what he meant by acceptance.  Accept what?

I don’t know what he meant by acceptance.  All I want to do is ask him to see us twice a week.  Would that be nurturing enough for Tina to see the only person she even semi-trusts for two hours a week?  Therapist would say no and charge us with finding other people we can trust, and then that would be the death of that relationship and I guess therapy.  

I think Therapist believes the only way to nurture Tina is through relationships, I guess so she can learn his fable that not everybody is scary and out to get us.  

We’ve not really talked with anyone, but we’ve hemmed and hawed to a couple of people about our stress, anxiety, and depression.  But truly it’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.  One lady knows scant little and it would be great if she had been in touch with me these past few weeks during the death of Husband’s father and our move.

I want to prove Therapist wrong.  What if he’s right?  Of course he’s not.

I so wanted to get through life with D.I.D. differently.  I wanted inner communication.  I wanted to have the gaps filled.  I wanted to know myself and feel whole.  Therapist says i know or have an idea of what happened to me.  I might have an idea, but it is so vague.  I really don’t know.  I really don’t.  

All of this just brings up a panic in me.  Is Therapist saying I’m at the end of my therapy journey, that I can get on without therapy?  It doesn’t fix the current dissociation.  

I guess i have a fear i’m being cast off, abandoned, declared with simplicity that all i need are friends, trustworthy people.  And I will be so sad if that is what he is saying because having friends won’t fix these problems.

So, acceptance.  Hmmm.  Accept what?  What work have we done?  None.  Or we’ve regressed.  The insides feel distant, like no one knows each other.  I don’t have memories of who they are, what they’ve been through.  I feel like I’m starting all over.

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I feel dissociative but for no reason at all.  It’s not really a big deal.  I can just feel them behind my eyes, watching.  There are things i don’t want to write here because I’m afraid someone will put it on the blog.

I guess I can almost accept being dissociative and having other inside people a part of me.  I don’t like accepting it and there still is resistance.  I can’t fight much anymore.  I’m tired of fighting.  Fighting for the sake of fighting.

I hate that Therapist was told Tina trusted him some, but on some level we all trust him more than anyone, even Husband.  I wonder what it’d be like if we said we had love for him.  Not a romantic, inappropriate, stalky, perverted kind of love.  But a benign, innocuous, healthy! kind of caring for him for being trustworthy to a degree so far.  Ugh. Is that wrong?

Which partly explains why the group as a whole can’t shake the idea of seeing him twice a week.  Maybe it’s mostly selfish, wanting to feel relatively safe twice a week for an hour each.  

But Therapist is so flawed.  His optimism angers me.  I find his bright-side-of-things view puts a lot of pressure on me to live up to his expectations, but that is impossible and will never happen.

He says I already have an idea of what happened to me already.  I know a cast of characters.  Uncle.  Neighbor.  But I honestly don’t know what they did.  Maybe they didn’t do anything.  I don’t know and wonder how what the inside people claim can be verified and proven.  But when I say something, anything, I want to be believed, not second guessed.  I bet they would want this too.

But I feel incomplete.  I don’t know the people/parts inside.  There is no communication, at least of which I’m aware.  I used to talk with them, but I stopped because I felt silly.  I didn’t think they were really talking back or working towards communicating.  Like doing anything like I used to do such as baking chocolate chip cookies together, getting them Build-A-Bears, sticker books, children’s books.  I wanted to believe there was a connection, but that’s probably where some of the doubt has come from.  It really felt as if I were the only one doing those things, like they weren’t actively helping.  I was doing it all alone.  Forever alone.

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I’ve been thinking today that I’m losing touch with me, life, and time.  I can recite and tell what  was done today, like making phone calls, taking my dog Maybelline for a walk, the route we took, and cooking dinner.  But none of it feels like me.  I know I did those things, but did the real me do it?  It doesn’t seem like time loss, although there was a kind of awakening where I realized I had not been in control up to that point.  I wonder what has been happening.  Like I remember to some degree writing the blog recently, but it wasn’t all me.  Where is reality?  Do I live in reality?  Am I real?

I flip flop back and forth on whether to share these journal entries with Therapist.  I don’t know why I do.  He acts like he knows everything because he never listens to me.  He always acts as if he knows all the answers.  

I wasn’t feeling dissociative before or during eating, but I feel it now.  

Again, am I real?

I don’t feel well.  I’m split in many different ways.  My future seems shaky and i worry about everything.  

Still thinking of Tina, I think she needs less and less of Husband.  I think he’s soaked in his own troubles and can not help any of us to any degree.  I think that’s why we get spacy, distant, and unsettled when he’s around.  Tina would be just fine living by herself without having to wrestle with Husband’s mood swings.  I’m not looking to leave him, but I’m not happy with the way things are.  I am trying to be especially patient since the death of his father, but I would assume his father’s death would be a catalyst for change.  

So we cooked dinner tonight.  I don’t know for sure because I’m not in touch with her enough, but I think she enjoyed it.

I bury my face in my hands.  There’s something bugging me, nagging me, and it won’t go away.  When I close my eyes, I see Tina standing there, surrounded in darkness.  I think I see others, young ones, sliding down hills in burlap bags.  Where is this coming from?

Therapist said I have an idea of what happened to me.  I’ve gone back and done some reading, and vague generalities are all I find.  

Some writing says I was “hurt”.  Well, hell, what does that mean?  I’m not looking for minute, painful details to be disclosed.  I just want to know what “hurt” means.  And I want to know how the parts developed, why were they needed, what do they want and need now.  What are their fears or happy times?

I want more.  I want to know more about the people/parts that total us.

But as I stop and think how good it sounds, I know it will never happen.  Fear always wins.  

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This may have been written, but it’s not cause for discussion.  Don't even think about it. Don’t you dare.

Home of the Not-So Brave

It’s been two weeks since I’ve written.  In that time I’ve lost a dear father-in-law to death, moved from a nice home to a cramped, crappy apartment, had an exhausting moving sale where all I did was fight with Birth Mother, and have barely escaped foreclosure on my home.  I’ve had enough.

In the meantime I’ve discovered I’ve been doing it all wrong.  Dissociation and my approach to it.

If there really is dissociation, and I still deny it, I won’t ever heal.  I don’t know how to handle insider people or if I even want to acknowledge them.  Just assuming I dissociate, I don’t want a relationship with them or hold that connection  with them long enough to hear from them what their hurts are, their boo-boos, their traumas.

Even as I type this, I’m rushing.  I want so little to do with this idea of dissociation or blog posting or anything associated with it.

I think at one point I might have wanted that connection, but I’m not doing the work with them I once was.

It is all overwhelming and makes me angry.  There’s no comfort for anyone here.

I don’t know how to create inside safety for them or even me.  Why create safety?  I don’t understand things.

I don’t want to speak with insiders who may or may not be feeling the trauma.  No one is hurting, but how would I know when I refuse to spend time with them?

I don’t care if they are good people or bad people, I want stay away.  

I’m scared.

One article I read said to remove replications of the outside trauma on the inside bodies.  GTFOH.  The author said there might be dirt, blood, mud, or messy stuff on the inside bodies.  TBH, I know this is true, but I can’t get rid of it.

The effing article also said to give the injured insiders “lots of TLC”.  Maybe the reason I am so defiant against the idea of being dissociative is because I am so well disconnected from them.  

And I also don’t have the patience for this crap.

I thought I was at one time building a genuine rapport with my inside people and that there was honest communication.  I think it’s why I like my last post found here.  It felt like honest communication.     But it has evaporated.  It’s like I woke up and had to start all over again with them so I decided I didn’t want to.  

So I hate them and I hate me for hating them.  

I’m also scared.  I don’t think since the original diagnosis over 20 years ago have I made any progress.  Where does that leave me because I don’t want to do the work anyway, so I’ll be stuck here for another twenty years if I make it.

I just want my words back and if one of those bitches took them I’ll be pissed.

What if I don’t have it in me to get better - not better - but have an inclusive, relatively peaceful life?  

I keep failing.  I don’t know who’s really in inside because I’ve shut them out so long.  I know names on a map but not personalities, and I don’t have the fortitude to find out.  

I”m out of time, in more ways than one.