*** QUESTION SIX: Are you, as a whole, in a relationship? How does romantic partnership work for you?
PeanutButter is married to all of us, and all of us to him. Saying certain alters aren’t married is silly. Impossible, even. He treats alters deferentially, and once had varying dynamics with them, but those distinctions aren’t as necessary anymore.
We were much more overt earlier in our relationship. Our healing has changed us to where addressing alters separately isn’t as imperative. The Motley is still acknowledged, but mostly we’re just living our lives together.
We’re not his first marriage, but we’re his first multiple. Our trauma history occasionally rears its head, and we have our ups and downs, but as relationships go, this is the safest, most comfortable (and longest!) one we’ve had.
*** QUESTION SIX-and-a-HALF: How do you feel about talking about the trauma which created your condition? Do you like to write about it privately or publicly? Why?
It sucks. I don’t like doing it. I don’t like being reminded of it, I don’t like how reminders are everywhere, and I don’t like seeing how much of my life had previously been dictated by it.
I don’t talk about it in everyday life. It slips into conversations with PeanutButter, but we try not to, even accidentally. We’ve worked hard to separate our current life from trauma time.
I’m not shy about saying childhood was difficult and early adulthood unconventional, but I don’t go into how. Most people will understand and back off when we say our family is not good people and are no longer a part of my life.
PeanutButter probably has a bigger picture than I realize due to the pieces he’s gleaned over the years, but we don’t tell him the harsher stuff. Some things are safer for everyone if we keep it close.
Those details are saved for Lighthouse’s office, and even then it’s taken years of trust-building. We don’t like writing it in our journals mostly because we don’t like reading it in our journals. I don’t need a written record of atrocities; I can speak it and release it.
We do our best to keep specifics unwritten on our blog, too. What we endured could probably be inferred, but it’s never our intention to dump horrors onto these pages. It’s more important to talk about its effects, how we moved past them, and the lessons we learned.
Trauma isn’t always about what happened to us, but how well we were equipped to tolerate it. DID isn’t about the abuse, but how we carried it. Maybe someday I’ll be able to talk about it more bluntly and plainly, but for now, this is enough.
#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #TraumaRecovery #Trauma #PTSD
*** 30 Days of DID survey credits go to tumblr user shihkas, and wordpress blogger catalyticconvergence. Links can be found in the original post ("An Adjusting of Vibrations") on our website ***
Latest
