The Green Form

So I've arrived at TDU. For the many of you that don't know what that is, its the Trauma and Dissociation Unit at a hospital in Brisbane...yep I fly up from the cold cold Melbourne weather to the, uh, struggling to be good and sunny, Brisbane weather. There are no other units like this in Australia or New Zealand. They work ONLY with people with dissociative disorders. The majority of people here have DID, Dissociative Identitiy Disorder, which is where one person switches between one personality to another (I'll explain more later, but please feel free to leave a comment with a question so I can answer them on a blog as soon as possible) but we do have some people that have PTSD with significant to severe dissociation. I'm of the first group of people, I have DID. DID is bought on by early childhood trauma and goes on for a very long time....in my instance about 27 years of my life...the first 25 being the worst.

BUT I'm not here to talk about the nuts and bolts of my disorder right now, I wanted to about paperwork and therapy! (In addition to homework and therapy and promises and therapy). So we have all these forms to fill in when we get to TDU, it can be slightly overwhelming...the most important of the forms is to hand in our menus so that you get dinner that evening! Most of the forms are standard, name, adddress, who pays the account etc...they have some forms that are meant to monitor your mood coming into the unit and leaving the unit...not that hard to fill out, but SHOULD be done with a professional present (but rarely is) and then the form of all forms, The Green Form.

The Green form (GF) asks questions like;
- How do you sleep?
- Do you wake early?
- Do you get dreams or nightmares?
- How do you damage with your sleep issues?

Believe me those are the easy qyestions... then we get....
Do you lose time? (If yes, explain)
Do you feel anxious or worried - explain
Then the dozey of a question, "Outline your system (all the different parts) their ages and their behaviours... they allow an entire page for this question and even only including very little details I still ran out of space!

So I go to the nurses station which I swear is in another state the walk is so far from my room (The dining hall is at least another country away - it is LITERALLY at the other end of the hospital and my heart no likey) and she is like, "Wow! This is the best filled in form ever!" Clearly she has not seen all the other green forms from my prior admissions.

This is what I wanted to discuss...I'm here to do therapy, I'm so far from perfect its crazy, I'm scared of screwing up everything I do, but I'm in therapy trying as hard as I can get, through all the super difficult stuff that results in tears, all the miscommunication that leaves me feeling isolated, theere are just so very many different ways that therapy can make you feel like crap...but honestly, what is the point of taking my flight across two states, away from my family and a number of friends and outside of my very precious routine...if I'm not willing to put in as much honest effort as I can.

So, I pick up the green form and carefully and considerately, I fill it in to the best of my ability. I know that MANY people here don't give much detail, they tend to just put "Yes." or "no." or "See last admission" and in many ways that is fair enough, but I figure that things also change and it would probably be better to be in their best interests to fill out the green form as best they can. I take time with the 'wretched' form so I can get the best help available to me.

See the thing is, aside from people who have mandated treatment, everyone is in treatment voluntarily and then comes the next issue...sure, we all have out bad times and difficult time and we ALL have times where we need a friends and/or family to help carry use along especailly between appointments with the professionals. It's OUR choice to be there (in therapy), we could leave at any stage that we want to, but we choose to stay in the hope that we take maybe 2 steps forward, or maybe even half a step forward depending on what is going on for us.

So why would we sabotage ourselves by something as simple as a Green form!?!?

For some people their "green form" might be sticking to the meal plan, or turning up to an appointment, or not lying to people about what we've done/not done, or not lying by omission. There's lots of things we do that mean that those treating us don't have ALL the information that is available to them at that time to help us. Now clearly, we don't necessarily know everything that is going on for us, I'm not talking about neglecting that but rather about providing all the information that we have at that particular time, I'm talking about taking your integrity back and being honest.

What is your green form? Why do you struggle so much to engage with it :)