Dissociation

This afternoon, I got out some forms that I had to submit to the Department of Health a little while ago. I had to give professional answers to a list of questions. I thought that I should read what was written....I did not write those answers....well I, the body of Anya, did but not me...no that is Ana's handiwork. I don't even have any memory of it to be honest. Some of the answers are really really good! As a result we're going into the Department of Health on Thursday to discuss this whole issue. I'm concerned that we'll get in there and won't know what to say, Ana knows that stuff she wrote about and its very coherent and useful...but the rest of us don't. See there are about 24 of us but us, I'm talking about the number of parts/alters/personalities (whatever you would like to call them) that make up the core person R. We all have different roles and functions and sometimes (well no, a LOT of the time) we lose a lot of time.

Sometimes when we lose time we just stare into space, very rigid and still, unmoving for hours and hours on end, we "awake" with no memory of it. Other times different parts come out at different times to do different things while the rest of us remain kept hidden away. Sometimes we watch, sometimes we help and other times we're just not there. Do you know how disconcerting it is to arrive a day or two or a month later and play catch up on all the important things you've missed? It's tricky.

Tonight has been like that. I've been fighting to get out to write for ages, especially since we discovered that these answers were written by a different part of us. Now a few of us need to do homework in case for some reason she won't be present at the appointment. But hours have passed. In some ways I think this is normal, everyone loses time at some stage in their life, be it they lose 10 minutes driving and realise they haven't been paying strict attention to the road rules, or they tune out in class and don't hear a thing a lecturer says, or they get preoccupied by something they're doing and wow all of a sudden 2 hours is gone. That is weird and hard enough in general...but for MOST people it is still their one core person that has been interacting in that time even though they don't really realise it. For us...it could be any of us or any combination of us at any time...that makes life really really tricky a lot of the time. We've become pro's at responding to the host's name, we've been excellent at using logic to catch up on conversations, or at the very least to nod and smile....but in between times "out" there could've been a dozen or so different parts of us doing things.

We have such strict routines about where to put stuff about how to take our medication about who can and cannot drive...things that we just DID over time because otherwise everything goes missing and that's a pain. As it is every night we lose the remote control, EVERY SINGLE NIGHT, needless to say it doesn't have a permanent home yet which is part of the problem. But even with all this, there are so many gaps and so much confusion.

Essentially Dissociative Identity Disorder comes about as a result of severe trauma at a young age. The brain and the body cannot cope or process the trauma at that age and thus in the susceptible individuals, their brain splits off the trauma....but instead of that being the last thing that happens, the brain develops different identities to fit around the trauma. So like me, I don't experience trauma particularly, I help to provide professional help to people but I don't remember ME going through any major trauma (unless you consider being yelled about by parents of clients traumatic  which it could be, but not quite on the same league as for DID)....so that is how I can do this blog and write what I do with clients...but there are other parts that won't sleep for fear of being hurt, or want to die because they can't cope with the pain very much or just want to be held and looked after like the little child they might be. So it gets confusing, we get told a lot that we are not individual people, but that is not how it feels or what it is like. We each have our likes and dislikes, we each have people in the "system" (ie the body/brain) that we do and don't like, we can often talk different, and present differently, especially if you're paying attention. I cannot necessarily remember what another part/alter/personality has done, and neither can they necessarily remember what I have done. It's confusing, its a mess.

Right now something coherent would be good, but everyone is so scattered and scared that we cannot see each other so much. We come out for however long, disappear again until we're needed again. I don't know when things will be normal again. We have really nice people that look after us and we're very thankful for them but its still very tricky when you never quite know how long you'll be around for.

I guess I should say that even though I oversee this blog, it's not always me writing! I'm not going to be nice and tell you who is and who isn't either, you don't need to know that. But realise that sometimes if you see an opinion that seems at odds with something else we've written, perhaps its another part/alter/personality with another part of the story. We also need a lot of grace for all the things we forget because we're no longer present until after key events, we need a lot of grace for being annoying when we're switching between fragments of ourselves, we need a lot of grace for all the things we forget because you told another part of us and they didn't pass on the message (and usually they don't even know to pass on the message or how to). We need a lot of grace period.

Finally, at a seminar we once went to, the leader said that people with DID do not have fully comprehensive personalities....they are only ever part of the whole, together all the different parts/alters/personalities make up the whole and they can really only function as a whole when they're working together or "fully integrated" to make things happen....in the mean time, its like working with 1/20th of who you are all the time, that is seriously impairing to many of things in life!