Scattered pieces

A good friend recently mentioned that she felt like she was going to fall, and fall deeply.  Part of her was expecting, and almost wanting the fall to happen.  Thankfully, her fall hasn’t happened, and I hope it doesn’t; but what she describes is a feeling I know all to well.  It’s like standing on an edge, waiting for that last push to send you over into a mental health free-fall.  The scary bit about standing there, is that you have an awareness about where you are.  You know that one more negative thing is going to push you over, and part of you wishes that it would come so that it’s over with; but another part of you hopes that you can still claw your way back to safer ground.  It becomes a tug of war between different parts of you…  This alone is so tiring that it can be enough to tip you over…

I know I’m also moving closer to the edge.  The stressors in my life have kicked into high gear and I can feel the pressure building.  At the moment, I’m far enough away to know that I’m in danger without being too close to it.  A part of me niggles that I’m thinking myself into moving towards the edge – why do I think of my ex-husband, why worry about the ACC assessments etc.  But the rational part of my brain knows that I’m experiencing PTSD flashbacks and my worry is justified based on past assessments.  This is the beginning of the tug of war that intensifies over time.  Soon other issues will come in to muddy the waters – denial, and a need for validation have already started to appear.  All of this increases my anxiety levels.  I’ve experienced this often enough in the last few years to notice the pattern…  It becomes like a dance, to and fro… ever closer to the edge…

The problem becomes, how do you stop the dance?  If I called a crisis line, they would take me through the individual stressors I am facing and encourage me to break them down into solvable chunks.  This would work for some of the issues I’m facing, but they can’t help with the PTSD symptoms.  I saw Jo today, and she was recommending trying to ground in the present, and while I agree with her reasoning, I also know that I can be very grounded in 2010 and still keep on dancing towards the edge.  Some of the grounding work can make the situation worse – repeating “it’s the 26th of January, 2010 and they are just memories” can morph into a denial statement about the memories all being made up.  The most effective way of keeping the anxiety at bay is to consciously breathe deeply – this also tends to by one of the first things I forget to do.  Like many survivors who experience anxiety, I have a form of hyperventilation syndrome, with my breathing being short and shallow.  It takes a conscious effort to alter my breathing pattern to a healthier depth and pace.  Changing my breathing will temporarily ease the anxiety, but often this isn’t enough to stop the dance towards the edge.  I’m not always sure what moves me away from the edge, I think this time it will be the formal dissolution of my marriage and completing the ACC assessment.  If this is the case, I’ve got about another three weeks of doing the dance around the edge.  I don’t think I’ll fall, but a part of me thinks I will…  A part of me wants to fall, because they think that this is what I deserve…

And so the dance continues…

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Now playing: The Feelers – Stand Up
via FoxyTunes

I’m on Facebook…  The big thing about Facebook is that it tries to encourage connections – connections with your workplace, interest groups, family, current friends and people from the past.  As a person who is fairly wary of friendships and making connections, I have only a few friends on Facebook – mainly people from the survivor community, a couple of family members and more recently a couple of people from my childhood.  One of the ways in which Facebook encourages connections is by suggesting friends for you based on the friends of your friends.  This means that you get a list of people Facebook suggest that you might like to become friends with, because one of your friends happens to know them.  This was all very innocuous, up until the point where I friended the people from my childhood.  These were safe friends when I was younger, so they weren’t triggering or associated with anything negative.  It just so happens that some of their friends are people who hurt us.  Last night, I logged into Facebook and on the right hand side of my screen were the photos of two of the people who hurt us.  These boys (now men) were part of a gang of boys that hurt us… One of them has a smiling photo of his family, which includes a daughter who would be about the age I was when he was hurting me.  It was such a shock to see these men smiling out at me.  They looked so “normal” and happy, you’d never expect them to have anything untoward in their past.

I have very little memory of my past involving these people.  I have vague images of a wood sheds, boys, smells and the light coming through the window…  Seeing these men and their smiling families triggered switching and internal chaos.  I didn’t even think I remembered their names, but obviously someone inside remembered when it was combined with their photo.  The problem is, what do I do with this?  If asked about the past, these men would probably say that what occurred in the wood shed was natural experimentation amongst consenting children.  There is no way that I could do anything about bringing charges against these men, it was too long ago in a context that could be twisted too easily.

But now, one of my safe escapes has been invaded by their presence.  I could “un-friend” the people from my childhood, but the parts of me that remember the carefree times we had with these people are reluctant to do this.  I’m also not sure that I want these men to have power over me… but sitting here writing this, I’m starting to have memories around the physical pain inflicted by these boys.  I keep thinking that they’re just silly photos, I don’t have to look at them, but, they’re like a car wreck – you don’t want to look, but you end up looking anyway.

I’ve yet to find a way to turn off the “Suggestions” area of Facebook, if anyone knows how, I would appreciate them letting me know.  I could block these men, but that means going into their profile which is something I wasn’t strong enough to do at the time.  Maybe today or tomorrow I will have the strength to block them…  I hope so.

It’s now Christmas Day in New Zealand – 2.30am on Christmas Day to be exact.  Aimee desperately wants to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a safe holiday.

We know that this time of year can bring pain to survivors of abuse and those from dysfunctional families… Our hope is that those painful memories are eased and positive traditions are created.

Take care of you and yours this holiday season,
CG

Last night, one of the lives that one of us leads, intruded on our normal functioning.  This made us wonder how many lives we lead and what impact this has.  Everyone talks about having different roles or persona’s they present to the world, e.g. how you act and appear at work is possibly different from how you would act at a dinner party on a Saturday night.  It appears as if this sort of thing is usual for the singleton population.  As someone who experiences dissociation, I’ve often wondered whether my experiences are all that different from this sort of usual occurrence.  That is, until the way the two different parts run their life collide, then it becomes obvious that we may not fit “usual”.

As a singleton with various aspects of one personality, there seems to be some consistency in the way you interact with the world – that is, your ethics, morals and way of viewing the world don’t change significantly.  There might be more slippage in the way some things are viewed, but overall you are consistent.  Whereas I experience what I would consider more of a sliding scale, especially when it comes to morals and our way of viewing the world.  Our ethics seem fairly consistent – a desire not to intentionally harm others is one common denominator; but our morals especially, seem to be more variable.  This seems to contradict some of the research I have read where morals and ethics are consistent across the dissociative system – if one part performs an action then it is something that the rest of the system is capable of.  So, I as CG are capable of my usual shyness as well as Sophie’s outgoing happiness and S’s overt sexuality.  I’m also capable of the actions that occur from the way those parts view the world.  I struggle with this concept greatly…  Sophie’s outgoing happiness and innocence is a direct contrast to S’s overt sexuality; how can these be morally consistent?  Each part has their own group of contacts online and when there is a collision between these groups, the differences become obvious.  The other night, we were chatting online with a friend, during the chat we received a message for S from one of her online contacts.  The confusion and resulting anxiety lead to a dissociative switch with S coming forward to try and get rid of the person we were talking to so she could talk to her contact.

It is rare for all of us to respect or consider anyone a friend, but there are a few that S doesn’t feel the need to control, manipulate or please.  Does this mean that we are morally consistent?  Or, does it mean that S is healing and learning that controlling people isn’t always necessary?  I’m not sure of the answers.  What’s interesting, is that it’s our male friends that she is more likely to have contact with, but yet she doesn’t fall into the old patterns of sexual manipulation.  I’m not really sure if she considers them friends, authority figures or objects to be studied out of curiosity.  But it’s a marked contrast to our female friends, whom she expresses no interest in talking to.  Possibly because in some respects the abuse we were subjected to by women was physical as well as sexual and psychological, so there is a different dynamic going on.

I’ll take this to Liz on Tuesday and see what she thinks…  I’m not sure that I’m fully grasping the difference between a singletons presentation of different persona’s, and someone with DID presenting with different dissociative parts.

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Now playing: U2 – Running to Stand Still
via FoxyTunes

Like many survivors, I learned from an early age that people weren’t to be trusted – a smile could hide other motives, laughter could mean that someone was heading towards drunkenness, etc.  I also learned that people I considered friends could, and would, set me up for abuse in order to save themselves.  These friends were also victims, but that betrayal of trust isolated us further.  A result of these early betrayals, is a range of behaviours that could be classed as avoidant – I avoid people, attachments and social situations.

These avoidant traits have been with me for so long that it’s hard to imagine a world without them.  I was described as a loner during my childhood, and now I have no one that I would consider a friend to share basic things such as go to the movies or to go for a coffee.  It is rare for me to feel any regret or worry over this isolation – which has made me question whether it truly is an indication of an avoidant personality, or just my natural inclinations…  The online world however, is slightly different.  I have people that I’ve known online for over two years and consider them friends.  Sometimes I help them, sometimes they help me – there is some form of mutual benefit in the relationship that goes beyond any tangible value.

This brings me to last night, which was a particularly rough night for me – I was sad, needing to self-injure and feeling lost.  Thankfully one of my online friends was available to chat.  As I’ve never had a friend who has understood me in the past, I’m never sure if the reactions I experience when chatting with an online friend is “normal” within the context of friendships.  Last night, my friend and I were trying to describe the experience, we decided that it was like getting a warm safe hug from someone – there is a feeling of being safe, protected, understood and as if there was a buffer to cushion you against any hurt.  This feeling makes both of us smile, with our respective younger parts feeling safe to come forward to play, tease and have fun.  I have other online friends who I feel a similar sense of comfort and safety that don’t trigger the presence of the younger parts, but this particular friend does.  The main result of the younger parts being present, is a sense of freedom and joy – something that is very foreign to me when talking to anyone.

I know that I have done entries in here about friends in the past.  But one thing I’ve learned is that you can never take friendship for granted.  It’s something to be valued, cultivated and be thankful for.  If they are good friends, then this will be reciprocated – not necessarily in blog entries, but in more subtle and meaningful ways – asking how you are and pausing for an answer… listening to what is being said and responding appropriately…  These little things add up to that feeling of being valued as a person with an opinion that matters.  This is also why I value the comments I get on this blog.  They a little snippets from people who have taken the time to respond to something that caught their interest.  I try not to take that for granted, but also not be fawningly grateful :)

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Now playing: Brooke Fraser – Scarlet
via FoxyTunes

Please note that this may trigger.

The husband of our cynical friend was buried today.  It was an amazing service which showed how much he was loved by those around him.  The eulogies were funny and heartfelt.  Our friend held up well throughout the funeral, she cried and was supported by her youngest daughter… the love within the family was obvious and honest.  One of the graphic designers at work did a montage of photos of his life, it was amazing to see how much he had changed, but not changed over the years – the laughter in his eyes was there all the way through.

We were close to not going to the funeral, we don’t find funerals easy things to attend.  They tend to overwhelm us with too many messages… but we were fine today.  Our friend also said she was looking for us when we went to give her a hug afterwards, so I’m glad we went.  She deserves all the support she can get.

After the funeral there was a wake held at a working men’s club.  We didn’t particularly want to go to this as we knew there would be lots of people, but everyone from work pressured us into going.  We were fine driving there and parking… it was when we got to the door that the trouble began.  This club is like many throughout New Zealand, they have a similar feel and design – a big open space with table for standing and drinking at while you watch the big screen TV, and another area for dining.  The smell of alcohol greets you at the door.  What also greeted me at the door was the first flashback.

The father managed a working men’s club as we were growing up.  Our lives revolved around that club, sport and alcohol.  We were abused at that club.  We were forced to drink alcohol for the first time in that club.  Some of us still live in that club within our head, they’re stuck there.  Walking into the club today triggered them all…

M took control as best she could, but she has problems with alcohol – she uses it to drown out the noise in the head.  As we walked to the bar all we could hear is the noise of the crowd becoming fainter and the internal screaming getting louder and louder.

“Raspberry and chips… raspberry and chips… raspberry and chips…”

This is all M could hear, so she orders a drink to drown out the sound.  The screaming gets louder as she takes the first sip of beer.  She always drinks beer as it makes us drunk quicker.  The first beer doesn’t deaden the screaming, time for another…

Random flashes, snippets and sounds from the past come through… some good, some not so good, some horrific.  Still the screaming…

“Raspberry and chips… raspberry and chips… raspberry and chips…”

M tries deep breathing, but that doesn’t calm the noise…  Time for another drink.  No one around us is aware of anything going on.  M answers all the questions and shows an interest in everything as she continues to drink. I don’t know how much she drank, it’s always hard to tell as the dissociation seems to mask the effects of the alcohol… or maybe we’re just immune to the effects, I’m not sure.

We all know what “Raspberry and chips” means… it was a reward for being a good girl after the abuse.  We hate raspberry soda and potato chips…

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Now playing: Crowded House – Better be home soon
via FoxyTunes

I’m struggling…  struggling to maintain the feeling of being alive and being an adult.

Tomorrow I go to the funeral of my cynical work friends husband.  He died on Sunday after a year of battling cancer.  I unsuccessfully researched the guilt associated with someone who is suicidal continuing to live, while someone who was in love and loved life dies a horrible death.  There seems a great injustice in that scenario.  When I mentioned it to Liz on Monday, she came very close to talking about religion again, but squeaked by with the “there must be a reason” line.  I’m at a loss as to what that reason is.

We’ve been asking M to do a majority of the work and I think this might be part of the reason why we’re struggling.  M is incredibly functional, focused and driven; but she comes with the baggage of addiction issues which can harm the rest of us.  I’m not sure how to break through this barrier that we seem to have up.  I’m not sure if it is the time of year causing the problem (Wedding Anniversary, ex-husbands birthday and Christmas are approaching).  It could also be the work environment which is still negative and emotionally draining.

I suppose the big problem is that I was hoping the time off work would help to ease these issues, but it hasn’t.  Maybe I was hoping for another quick fix…  I’m realising that quick fixes don’t seem to exist within mental health.

“Unfit for work…” those words sting, they really do.  They’re the words used to explain why I won’t be able to work for the next 12 days.  They’re part of the standard form that the doctor fills in, so it’s nothing personal, but it means failure to some of us.  We know that our functioning at work has been so poor that there was no other choice, but it still cuts us to the core of what many of us perceive as our self-worth.  M in particular, is struggling with being put off work, yet she was the one who made the appointment and mentioned the problems we were having, knowing full well that enforced sick leave was the likely outcome.  M couldn’t hand the medical certificate over in person – it would be like admitting failure and having to face the disappointment of those around us; so we left it on the team leaders desk with an email message apologising for the inconvenience we were causing.  Some of us consider this the wimps way out… failing to face up to our responsibilities and the repercussions of our actions.

This morning we got a text message from our cynical work friend asking how we were.  I wasn’t sure how to respond, I know that in some ways I’m trying to protect her – she’s got enough on her plate without hearing my sob story.  So I sugar-coated what was happening.  No one at work was expecting us to have this time off, so it probably came as a shock.  I suppose this is one example of how we can appear so high functioning, but really be a total and utter mess.  What I fear the most is the reaction when we get back to work… will people alienate us, want to hug us, avoid talking about it?  At their core, the people that I work with are good and kind people, but they don’t understand mental health issues.  This means that I will odds are lie about what has happened when I get back to work, I’ll find some acceptable lie that doesn’t make them squirm.

This week we’ve also seen Jo and Liz…

Jo became quite worried about our safety after we did a collage with her.  It can be quite amusing on one level to see Jo’s art work which is all about love and happiness, while ours is dark and full of violence.  We both had mindless woman’s magazines to use as base material for the collage.  I had words like key, disappear, invisible… Jo had love and rainbow.  I had a picture of a puppet running through a door… Jo had a smiling woman on the beach.  She was concerned about our safety to the point of contacting Liz.  Poor Liz also now realises how much we were testing her when we first started seeing her – with Jo we go with the flow, but with Liz we resisted and argued at the beginning.  This wasn’t deliberate, but rather an unconscious way to see whether Liz was going to be able to help us heal and put up with what we could throw at her.

When we saw Liz, it was what I would consider a disaster.  Little Michelle came forward and made it almost impossible for us to speak.  She has such a problem with words and forming them that it’s like she is stuttering, but I don’t think it’s a true stutter, I think it’s more about not wanting to tell the secrets.  At one point, we were stuck on one sentence, and in particular one word… “I’m not special“.  We were so incapable of saying the word special, that we ended up having to write it down.  Little Michelle stuttered through explaining that she wasn’t “that word” to anyone, because if you were “that word” you then got hurt.  She wanted to runaway so that the pain would stop.  Liz offered to runaway with her, but Little Michelle said that no one else was allowed to come.  All the time this was going on, there were ones in the background yelling that she was telling lies and it’s all rubbish.  This was the first time the messages about it all being lies were so closely tied to someone saying anything.  Little Michelle shared no abusive events, but her presence alone was enough to stir-up the denial and nay-sayers.  That probably means something in psychology land, but to us it just felt crazy.

So we have 11 more days before we are allowed back to work…  We’re meant to relax and unwind…  This is terrifying!  Work is our structure, our safety.  Suddenly we’re meant to do this thing called relaxation and rest.  We’ve actively avoided doing either of those things for about 20 years…  Today we survived by going down to the gardens and taking pictures with the new lens’ we got the other day.  Not sure how we’re going to cope with another 11 days of this.

Here’s a random photo we took today…

Cherry blossom

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Now playing: Shihad – Pacifier
via FoxyTunes

I have come to a point in my healing where the sometimes dichotomous thinking and advice that I have been given has become confusing and counter-productive.  I said in a previous post that I have become so good at distraction techniques, that they have become another form of dissociating the pain and problems away.  I understand why they were shown to me, during the last two years of the marriage, I was consistently suicidal.  I thought death was the only way out of the marriage, as I knew he would never let me leave.  One of the first strategies they tell you when you are suicidal is to distract.  This makes sense when you’re so overwhelmed that suicide is the only option you can see.  So for years, I was told to distract my problems away.  This was the equivalent of telling me to put the problem in a box and put it in the archives of The Basement – which is exactly how I dissociate bad experiences, memories etc.  I’m pretty good at dissociating, and I am pretty good at using the distraction techniques to the point where they are also a dissociated and sometimes self-harmful experience.

Recently, I’ve heard more and more about looking at the pain.  The exact opposite to what I’ve been told to do for years.  It started off with practising some modified Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) – modified so that the names of the points have non-violent connotations and the taps to the head are not utilised.  EFT uses tapping pressure points on the body in combination with phrases to help ease emotional pain.  The phrases used are what I would consider ones which encourages you to think of the pain e.g. “even though I want to self-injure I fully and completely accept myself”.  So it was encouraging me to accept that this painful fact is part of me and that I’m not a bad or negative person for feeling that pain.  What was interesting doing this, is that it depended on who held the pain as to whether it was helpful or not.  If the pain was buried within the dissociative system, then the EFT often makes the dissociation worse.  Remember – this is just my experience and not necessarily one that others will encounter, or even one that I will continue to experience as time goes on.

Then today I read what was probably the most obvious and moving reason why I need to look at the pain.  It was Shen’s (Reunited Selves) entry in the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse (September 2009) called The Hole in the Soul.  This post shows why we need to heal, the consequences of not healing, the positives that come from healing and acknowledgement of the pain and fear that the process creates.  It doesn’t encourage any particular method of healing, but rather advocates for an attitude, a willingness to do the work and a strength to keep on that journey.  I’m not sure if I have any of these qualities to the point of being able to look at, what Shen describes as, the hole in my soul.  Some of us balk at the use of the term “soul”, but I understand that we have a lightness and a blackness within.  Our internal Basement is in total darkness, while our internal Attic is bathed in light.  The Basement is where the most painful memories and emotions are kept, so I see the correlation.

As an aside, when M draws within therapy, she often does a black swirling circle, I wonder if she is drawing our “hole” and a representation of our feelings about all of this.  She’s our worst artist, so it could just be that’s all she can draw.  But it’s always black and it’s always circular, like a spiral or a tunnel.  This again could correlate to The Basement which is perceived as being bottomless.

So this need to face my pain is what I’m taking to Liz next week.  Liz has asked if we can put aside issues before to try and cope, but this isn’t possible with our current levels of functioning and being in the world.  We must either dissociate or distract it away from existence…  If nothing else, this new possibility for healing has helped to ease the place we have been in for the last week.

Thank you Shen for that amazing story and to those friends who have helped over the last few weeks, it is appreciated.

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Now playing: Dixie Chicks – Wide Open Spaces
via FoxyTunes

Today I went onto Polyvore to do a set as a coping mechansim, and found this gift from LostShadowChild instead…

for castorgirl by LostShadowChild on Polyvore.com

Thank you… Thank you so much.

LostShadowchild, I hope you don’t mind me adding it here.  If you want me to take it down just let me know :)