Hi, my name is AnneL. I'm here because I am asurvivor of sexual, emotional, and mental abuse, raised in a dysfunctional home who unfortunately didn’t get help and while not continuing the sexual abuse, was neglectful, physically abusive for a period of time, and damaged my adult children, who I now see passing some of the dysfunction on. I want to learn how to help my children heal from my actions, learn how to have healthy relationships, and heal myself.
2 reactions Another post by The Self:
When I raise something calmly and you immediately say, “I guess I’m the worst person ever,” the conversation has already been hijacked.
Because now we are not talking about what happened. We are talking about how bad you feel for being told it happened.
Now I am expected to reassure you. Soften it. Take it back. Prove I do not hate you. Prove I am not attacking you. Prove I still think you are a good person. And somehow, my hurt disappears under the weight of your reaction.
That is not accountability.
That is emotional deflection.
“I can never do anything right.”
“I’ll just stop trying then.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“You sort it out yourself then.”
“I won’t bother anymore.”
“I’m a bad parent.”
Those sentences might sound like guilt, but they often function like control. They pull the focus away from the behaviour and place it back onto the person who was brave enough to name it.
So here is what I am learning to say:
“I am not calling you the worst person ever. I am naming one thing that hurt me. Please stay with that.”
“I am not asking you to collapse. I am asking you to listen.”
“This is not about you hating yourself. This is about whether you are willing to understand the impact.”
“I am not going to comfort you out of accountability.”
“If you need a break, take one. But I am not taking back what I said just because it made you uncomfortable.”
Because a boundary is not an attack.
A feeling is not cruelty.
A hard conversation is not abuse just because it requires someone to look at their behaviour.
Real repair does not sound like, “Fine, I’ll never try again.”
Real repair sounds like, “I hear you. I did not realise that hurt you. I need to sit with that. I want to do better.”
There is a difference between remorse and self-pity.
Remorse makes room for the person who was hurt.
Self-pity makes the hurt person do more emotional labour.
And I am done abandoning myself in the middle of conversations just to rescue someone from the discomfort of being accountable.
If I bring up pain and you turn it into a performance of your own suffering, I do not have to follow you there.
I can stay with the truth.
I can stay with what happened.
I can stay with myself.
Because I am not responsible for managing the shame you feel when I finally stop pretending your behaviour did not hurt me.
#emotionalmanipulation #accountability #gaslighting #emotionalabuse #toxicrelationships #toxicfamily #narcissisticabuse #cptsd #complextrauma #boundaries #selftrust #traumahealing #healingjourney #emotionalmaturity #theself
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1 comment
When I raise something calmly and you immediately say, “I guess I’m the worst person ever,” the conversation has already been hijacked.
Because now we are not talking about what happened. We are talking about how bad you feel for being told it happened.
Now I am expected to reassure you. Soften it. Take it back. Prove I do not hate you. Prove I am not attacking you. Prove I still think you are a good person. And somehow, my hurt disappears under the weight of your reaction.
That is not accountability.
That is emotional deflection.
“I can never do anything right.”
“I’ll just stop trying then.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“You sort it out yourself then.”
“I won’t bother anymore.”
“I’m a bad parent.”
Those sentences might sound like guilt, but they often function like control. They pull the focus away from the behaviour and place it back onto the person who was brave enough to name it.
So here is what I am learning to say:
“I am not calling you the worst person ever. I am naming one thing that hurt me. Please stay with that.”
“I am not asking you to collapse. I am asking you to listen.”
“This is not about you hating yourself. This is about whether you are willing to understand the impact.”
“I am not going to comfort you out of accountability.”
“If you need a break, take one. But I am not taking back what I said just because it made you uncomfortable.”
Because a boundary is not an attack.
A feeling is not cruelty.
A hard conversation is not abuse just because it requires someone to look at their behaviour.
Real repair does not sound like, “Fine, I’ll never try again.”
Real repair sounds like, “I hear you. I did not realise that hurt you. I need to sit with that. I want to do better.”
There is a difference between remorse and self-pity.
Remorse makes room for the person who was hurt.
Self-pity makes the hurt person do more emotional labour.
And I am done abandoning myself in the middle of conversations just to rescue someone from the discomfort of being accountable.
If I bring up pain and you turn it into a performance of your own suffering, I do not have to follow you there.
I can stay with the truth.
I can stay with what happened.
I can stay with myself.
Because I am not responsible for managing the shame you feel when I finally stop pretending your behaviour did not hurt me.
#emotionalmanipulation #accountability #gaslighting #emotionalabuse #toxicrelationships #toxicfamily #narcissisticabuse #cptsd #complextrauma #boundaries #selftrust #traumahealing #healingjourney #emotionalmaturity #theself
4 reactions Hi, my name is Vicky Leon. I'm here because I survived a narcissistic relationship and instead of waiting until I was healed to speak, I started building in public. I write about sovereignty, narcissistic abuse recovery, and the forensic patterns that keep women small. I coined the term Ghostlighting, a manipulation pattern distinct from gaslighting, where someone erases your reality through absence rather than attack. I'm the founder of The Truth Club, host of The Truth Club podcast, and author of the novel The Thread Ruby. I believe words are the beginning of sovereignty and I'm here to give you the ones you've been missing.
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1 comment
When you're talkin' to everyone
And they look through you
As if you aren't there
The shame burns, feeling like a fool
You should have known
That this place is a loaded gun
Blasting your issues into your brain
You know that you are better off shunned
Ancient wounds have me old before my time
But I'm too young to harden my heart
Young at heart as I turn to stone
Must keep my mind from flying apart
I don't know what you want from me
Or why you attack my thoughts and dreams
I stand before you all, my throat bared
This place compels me to share everything
Because my mind is bleeding
I wish I could keep it inside
Wish that no one was ever annoyed
By the words that wash an endless infection
From the hopes of a long gone little boy
Still talkin' to everyone
And I'm an echo or a ghost
I know what you want from me
Order to my thoughts and dreams
To stand before you all, my throat scarred
From abuse enforcing conformity
But sunshine doesn't bleed from me
I think of all the reasons
That I do not belong
Why do I stand here, neck deep in my own wounds?
What curse lies upon this place?
Maybe it had the scent of a safe glade
Where I could shed my skin.
Beneath my hide the monster hid
The scent was threatening, carnage in the air
The trap sprung as I spewed words unsafe, @everyone beware
The mods surrounded me with sharpened words
"This place is safe for us, not you, you who bears this curse."
I failed to fit
Too many times to ever return
Every try sees another bridge burn
I fled in the tatters of my skin
Bearing the weight of a grievous sin
I made others feel uncomfortable
While their attacks on me the mods ignored
The double standard a punishment I deserve
The wounded cannot be welcomed anywhere
When the lights are strange in haunted eyes
And the blood stains pages upon pages until we know why
I wander, on and on
Searching for a place beyond
The grind
The pitiless grind
Of people
I knew that I would not belong
Was it foolish to even try?
All I've ever known is rejection
As my hopes have slowly died.
Based on "Estranged," by Guns 'n' Roses. It describes my experiences at a Discord server.
#Depression #Trauma #Suicide #PTSD #MentalHealth #MightyPoets
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4 comments
*** QUESTION NINE: What misinformation about DID irks you the most?
Oof. Not sure I want to answer this one. Not sure I should.
I’ve been skirting topics like this because of how deep the rabbit hole goes, and how it makes me feel. I avoid DID-specific social media and don't engage with online communities because of it. And because I don’t have the bandwidth for the drama that often accompanies it.
But, from the top of my head (and without any further explanation), here are some of the regular offenders I’ve seen over the years:
"DID is rare. DID isn’t real. DID is under-researched. Polyfragmentation isn’t real. Everyone with DID is faking. Nobody lies about having DID. DID never knows they have it. DID only finds out upon diagnosis. DID makes you lose your driving license, custody, housing. DID doesn’t say ‘we’. DID only says ‘we’. Alters and imaginary friends are the same thing. DID thinks internal worlds are a literal reality. DID can start outside of childhood. DID cannot be diagnosed in childhood. DID doesn’t require trauma. Alters don’t require dissociation. DID is a personality disorder. DID is an excuse. DID lets you plead insanity. DID is a choice. Alters cannot be willingly created. Alters cannot be forcibly created. Roles aren’t real. Mind control isn’t real. Certain types of abuse don’t exist. DID isn’t multiplicity. DID is only multiplicity. Only one alter is the real person. A host alter is expected. Integration should be avoided. Fusion makes alters disappear. Fusion is murder. Dormancy isn’t real. Subsystems aren’t real. System-hopping is possible. Amnesia is concrete, absolute, and predictable. Alters can’t have alters. Alters don’t have separate names. Alters who don’t front don’t exist. DID with high alter counts are impossible/non-functional/stuck in mental hospitals. DID is obvious. DID is invisible. Child alters are literal children. Alters are separate people. Alters can’t have physical differences. Alters can’t be similar. Alters can’t talk to each other. Alters are a delusion. Alters are roleplay. Alters can’t choose to switch. DID is doomed to forever dysfunction. People with DID can’t be happy. DID can’t be healed."
Whew. That’s enough of that. Moving on…
*** QUESTION NINE-and-a-HALF: What level of co-consciousness do you have? How do you feel your communication skills are within the system? How do you want to grow in those skills?
We used to distinguish sharing executive control with other alters but with no idea the other is there (co-present) and having awareness of and/or communication with co-present parts (co-conscious).
In the beginning, we were constantly co-present with little co-consciousness. Then, we could be co-conscious, but forgot almost immediately. Now, we blend more than switch, and, while it may take time, effort, and a little internal sleuthing to recall or contextualize a memory, we rarely lose time in our current day-to-day.
A future goal is for all of us to be able to recognize and verbalize our feelings and thoughts (such as signaling distress or discomfort) in the moment rather than hours or days later. To communicate without overwhelm.
To know what’s gonna come out of my mouth before I say it would be nice, too.
#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #dissociativedisorders #DissociationDisorders
*** 30 Days of DID survey credits go to tumblr user 'shihkas', and wordpress blogger 'catalyticconvergence'. Links can be found in the original post ("Dogged By DID") on our website. ***
2 reactions Work has its perks
WE'RE HEALTHY
and there's life for moments without the jerks
The sunny Spring paths or icy drIFTS
Are challenge that's fun
The walks by waterfalls and parks
Should always be
I'M GREETED BY A PUN
AND SOME time in the sun
The pain or bus travel is undone
There's enough for snacks n presents
And books n pics on the table
Abuse subsides n people are free for a while
There's music in the lobby
People flying along piano keys like home
Even walks for those walker or wheelchair bound
N small duties cared for and possibly recognized
But I am also worthless at times
Except for my iced coffee n chicken sandwiches
And no one knows the SI at worthlessness
But him and him and you
3 reactions 
*** QUESTION EIGHT: When did you first learn/hear about DID, if it was prior to your diagnosis?
Vague memories of mentions as far back as 2002 or 2003, and then again a few years later. I readily saw myself in dissociative symptoms but didn’t realize I could be realistically diagnosed. I didn’t pursue it, and back then, I don’t think our system was allowing it.
Funny thing: whenever this question comes up, I tend to apply it to only the misdiagnosis years in adulthood. I often forget about a book I’d frequently read as a tween- and teenager, the one where the character at the center of the story was diagnosed with MPD. The character I heavily related to, but didn’t know how or why.
Its publication date was in 1992, when Dissociative Identity Disorder was still named Multiple Personality Disorder, and I probably first read it soon after it hit the shelves, if not a little afterward; it was definitely a high-school re-re-re-read.
I still have that book. The same copy, even. It’s been decades; I should read it again, especially knowing what we do now. An upcoming entry for Multiples in the Media, mayhaps?
***QUESTION EIGHT-and-a-HALF: How did you first discover you were [multiple]? Was it before, after, or during diagnosis?
Before diagnosis. We count 2013 as the official date, but as memory serves, I started entertaining the idea in 2006 or ‘07, when presented with and needing to examine some extremely confronting evidence of switching activity.
A lot of extra hi’s in my journals and instant messenger conversations. Friends saying I was acting differently, or that I didn’t seem to recognize them. I asked my roommate, “I’m not the same T.W. you first met, am I?” and the question echoed with a lifelong familiarity.
Their affirming answer wasn’t comforting, either.
DID had been dogging me for at least a year prior to that, but I couldn’t take it seriously; I didn’t recognize my trauma as trauma, or my abuse as abuse. For awhile, I thought of it as another additional diagnosis — not one to replace all the others.
Then I detoxed the decade of psychotropics from our system, and absolutely nothing changed. Well, they did — but not how we’d been warned. Things became clearer; I could think again.
We were mostly on board with the idea of DID by 2012, but even as evidence mounted, I refused to believe until confirmed by a dissociative specialist who’d know what they were seeing.
Which opened up doorways to system discoveries beyond our imagination.
#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #DissociationDisorders #dissociativedisorders
*** 30 Days of DID survey credits go to tumblr user 'shihkas', and wordpress blogger 'catalyticconvergence'. Links can be found in the original post ("Dogged By DID") on our website. ***
4 reactions Hi, my name is mntlhlthckr. I'm here because I'm recovering from a substance abuse disorder.
#MightyTogether #Anxiety #Depression #ADHD #PTSD #RheumatoidArthritis #OCD #Grief
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2 comments
I've been scrolling through all those I've joined and am curious as to why some have not had a post for a year or more. If it's because this group isn't wanted or needed anymore, I don't believe it. If you're under staffed still doesn't make sense.
Any how, I hope and pray all us narcissist abuse survivors are healing and making mental improvements.
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