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.

Cheers to complications!

TRIGGER WARNING

********Talk of intimacy and sexuality *******

I told Therapist recently that I didn’t think the problem was with my marriage; it was with me.  While the trouble with my marriage isn’t that it’s all me, all of it has to do with me.  I don’t know any more if I dislike Husband, or I just want to be with someone else.  I know for sure I don’t want to be married again, and I long for the days when we become independent and self-sufficient.  And that will happen this semester when we are done with student teaching, we graduate, and enter the work force (hopefully). 

The issue is more complicated.  The issue is I want to be with a woman, not a man.  Every time I am *with* Husband, I feel sullied and unclean.  Recently we were intimate and I started crying the tears of a child half way through.  When Husband had finished, the tears wouldn’t stop.  We curled up and sobbed.  Husband said he was sorry, but we commented that even though he’s sorry he keeps doing it; he keeps asking for it.  He said it made it him feel like an abuser.  And yet, he keeps asking.  And that makes us look at him like an abuser, which makes intimacy even more difficult. 

There is a woman in the vast outer reaches of our life with whom we are attracted.  And it seems she is attracted to us.  We saw her yesterday, and she hugged us twice.  We get butterflies in the stomach when we think of her.  And we think of her a lot. 

And that is that.  It’s complicated.  Not all of us are on board with being with a woman.  Leaving Husband?  Maybe.  But not because a woman is involved.

But, cheers to complications and shutting my eyes!  They make the inertia of this life seem even less tolerable.   *insert sarcasm*

Relationships

I've been mulling this topic over since the weekend and have been trying to figure out how to write a sanitized version of what took place.
One of the many things we've learned with D.I.D. is just how hard relationships are to maintain.

I've been married over ten years. In fact, Valentine's Day marks 10 1/2 years of marriage. That's an accomplishment for someone who doesn't have to deal with dissociation, so for someone like us with D.I.D., it's almost impossible. We've heard of many marriages busting over the difficulty dealing with a spouse who is dissociative.
Husband and I have had our ups and downs. One thing we've always agreed on is "I do" has meant "I do" and neither of us have looked to abandon the other to divorce when we weren't getting along.

However, time seems to be molding us into a couple that just puts up with one another. I feel sorry for Husband. I know it's not easy living with someone with D.I.D.; Lord knows he tells me that all the time. Well, not all the time, but he's said it on more than one occasion. He tells me he doesn't always know how to act around us, that we give off mixed signals, that we've changed since marrying us.

Changed is an understatement. In all fairness, when we married, we hadn't accepted the diagnoses of D.I.D., and so didn't tell Husband. It wasn't until later in the marriage that we couldn't deny the symptoms anymore and things started falling apart. But Husband is right; we have changed. When we married we didn't have pink hair, nose piercings, and tattoos. How he HATES the tattoos!!!

I think he could live with all that but there is an area of our marriage that is under fire and he doesn't know how to deal with it; I don't either, for that matter. You see, we aren't as close in the Biblical sense as we used to be, if you know what I mean. In the beginning of our marriage, we as a system used to engage in "the act" because we didn't respect ourselves, so it didn't matter if "the act" hurt us or not. Now that we're trying to heal, that area of our lives is off limits to him until we get some healthier views toward s*xual relations. So, basically, Husband is having to go without and he doesn't know how to deal with it and that makes me feel guilty for depriving him. As a result, Husband and I have lost a sense of emotional closeness that gets fed by being physically close and that breaks my heart. Still, we as members can't give in until we have healed more, otherwise it would be too damaging.

So over the weekend Husband and I were arguing over the lack of closeness and if we would ever resume a physical relationship again. He feels it's hopeless. I have no answers for him. For me, it's just another brick in the wall; another hurdle that needs to be overcome before we can ever come close to "normal."
And that's all I have to say about that.