TraumaRecovery

*** QUESTION FIVE: Have you shared your diagnosis with anyone outside of your care team? If so, who and why?

I don’t have a care team, I have a therapist and that’s the only place my diagnosis is relevant. I don’t even tell other medical professionals. Neither my doctor nor my dentist need know, and PTSD/anxiety explains well enough for others to understand.

My spouse knows because of course he does, but DID is not a topic of conversation with friends, and DID is not my schtick. Regarding disclosure, my only answer is “Probably won’t,” and my advice to anyone would be, “Best don’t.”

*** QUESTION FIVE-and-a-HALF: How often do you switch? How often do you lose time? Talk a little about what dissociation is like for you.

Another answer that’s gone through a journey.

We still shift just as often, but we don’t switch the same way as before.

Defining switches was always tough. There were switches in the body, and in the mind, switches between alters, between subsystems, within subsystems. For us, switching was a frequent occurance; we had to switch in order to function well.

Now, our switches feel mostly internal, softer, and much more covert. Hard switches only happen under duress or after unexpected triggers, but still typically come with coconsciousness. Disorienting, time-losing switches tend to only happen during memory processing or therapy sessions, but this, too, is lessening.

Depersonalization is minimal and our derealization rare, and the general cloudiness only comes back in times of stress or intense emotional situations. I don’t know if we even have the ability to dissociate to the same levels as before.

We’re always sharing space, but rather than groups scattered around a central-I, the I now centers around all of us. We operate through that locus, and feel the presence of others, like a trickling down or a welling up. A hardening, a rearranging. An energy shift, a twitch, a gasp. A blending of differences, a mixing of paint, an adjusting of vibrations.

***

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.

#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #TraumaRecovery #MentalHealth #30daysofdid

It was dark. Cold. Snow dangled in the halo of the only streetlamp — and in the beaming red taillights of the long-distance coach I was supposed to be on.

How (or why) I got there is unimportant. What’s important is the envelope.

This is a story about survival and the kindness of strangers:

Someone Else’s Angel

#TraumaRecovery

I used to lament how life was one big circle. An indefinite loop where, no matter how hard or far I ran, I always found myself back at the same place. I’ve since learned to take that circle and stretch it out like a Slinky.

We’re not actually going in circles — we’re walking an ever-expanding spiral. Returning to the same places, but not in the same spaces. Cycles of becoming never end; as long as we live, we learn, we grow, we change. "Never the same river twice," so it’s said, "never the same man."

#MentalHealth #TraumaRecovery

I misunderstood hope as a monster, mistook its whispers for a hiss. I abhorred it, even though it was all I had. Resented it because it was all I had.

Villainy was never its purpose, and hope was never my enemy. Hope had been the only thing keeping me afloat, awake, and alive.

Hope absorbed our agony and churned it into fuel. It always knew another way and pushed us onward when nothing else was left.

Echoes of an unfailing inner faith; hope looks beyond the emptiness and says full. Hope cries and says more. Hope falls and says again, again, again.

#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #ComplexPosttraumaticStressDisorder #TraumaRecovery

(p.s. - this is an excerpt; original piece is written as an acrostic and can be found in its entirety on our personal website)

The pain is a memory, an echo of a yesterday that never should have happened.

We have already come through the fires. We survived the events, we are surviving the recovery, and we will survive the retelling.

The future we dreamed about is here, now. We built it. It’s ours. Nobody can take it away from us.

I can do this. Because I already did.

#ComplexPosttraumaticStressDisorder #DissociativeIdentityDisorder #TraumaRecovery

On our blog, we reference the “recovery corkscrew” concept more than any other. It’s probably most referenced by Lighthouse as well; in recovery, we’re always coming back to it.

It started as just an abstract idea with no application, though I now know it as an uncomfortable truth. Knowing it’s there brings relief; the circular pattern has become a dependable one.

The link we want to share today, "The Corkscrew" is written in a different style than our usual essays, but that’s the Motley voice for you. It was originally to help us understand, and it’s been kept unchanged.

#ComplexPosttraumaticStressDisorder #TraumaRecovery #Healing #MentalHealth #DissociativeIdentityDisorder The Corkscrew

I didn't choose to heal; it chose me.

I remember the moment I cut the cord from my parents, and it was scary and liberating. Not knowing how they would initially react, I was pleasantly surprised and heartbroken at their lack of outreach and misunderstanding. It's like they were waiting for this moment to happen. The longer I went without speaking to them, I began to realize the cold, hard truth that they didn't care at all.

Free from their grip, I began to spiral down a dark hole inside my mind of forgotten memories. I've lost count of how many times I've wanted to give up on that darkness. How many times I've told myself it's too hard, too painful, too much. But somehow I'm still here. Still trying to fulfill my purpose in this life.

I come from a lineage of people who survived by numbing, by silencing, by pretending nothing happened. So I came to this world to break all cycles, the ultimate generational curse breaker. It's literally in my birth chart. I felt a strong purpose since I was seven years old. I'm a firm believer that we choose our parents and the hardships we endure. I will clarify that we didn't sign up for exactly what happened; free will is truly a scary concept. I'm here to break the cycles of abuse, neglect, trauma, addiction, honestly, all of it.

All of the abuse I've been through, the neglect, the sexual abuse, emotional and verbal abuse has affected me in various ways. I'm emotionally intelligent, but my emotions explode because I was never taught how to regulate. I'm learning now. I stopped giving my body to random men well over ten years ago. Always searching for something that wasn't there or trying to fill the void of pain and loneliness. Teaching myself to be kind, not just to myself, but to others as well. Creating strong, healthy boundaries, learning to say no. The most challenging of them all: addiction.

I didn't start smoking cigarettes until the day after my 18th birthday, being peer pressured into it. I continued to smoke cigarettes until I was 31 years old and quit cold turkey. I started drinking the summer after high school, under peer pressure, to fit in with my friends, and I found an outlet. A way to cope with things that I didn't remember. I felt lost but found. There was smoking of cannabis during this time. I preferred smoking over drinking, but this was before it was legal in my state to purchase cannabis. I drank heavily for the next 8 years, always searching for someone to connect with on a physical level, but nothing beyond that. When I said the healing journey chose me, this is what I mean; in September 2015, I was at a wedding with some friends, and I had been drinking. Later in the evening, I got a migraine. My first ever, and that was the turning point in my life.

It was a glamorous journey. I struggled to be sober. I struggled with staying home on the weekends, not being able to be at the bar with friends. Who were not friends, just people that happened to be drinking at the same watering hole. It honestly wasn't until after the New Year that I started to make real changes. I saw a doctor, I went on depression meds, and started practicing Yoga once per week. I spent the next few years physcially detoxing from all the crap I put in my body. I changed my diet, tried to sleep more, exercise, etc. I felt like I was walking up an icy mountain, not really making any progress but still trying. Mainly because I was still living with my parents at this time. Still under their abusive manipulation. I had no idea what I had just started.

I did quit drinking. My mom was an alcoholic, so that's an easy no for me. She killed herself three years ago. That's another story, for another time. I did, however, utilize the fact that at the beginning of 2020, marijuana became legal in my state. It was a godsend. Marijuana helped me cope and process over the next 5 years, and now here I am present moment, writing this out and struggling to let go of my edibles. My body is rejecting them, just like my body was rejecting alcohol. I crave the numbness, the release, but my heart says no. It's an internal battle that I keep to myself, wishing to be sober, but the bridge to get there is burning, itchy cravings that are the hardest part to get through.

I'm at the end of my numbing journey. I now know that I don't need it anymore. It's the in-between the old and the new, learning to cope with new techniques. I now choose healing not because it's easy, but because I'm tired of pain being the only legacy I carry forward. I refuse to be like either of my parents. I won't let my story end the same way. I also know deep in my soul that I am meant to help bring great change. It may feel like to end is all around, but I have hope that this is the downfall that we all need. Whether that's on your own personal journey or in the current state of our world. The old must be exposed before the new can be accepted.

Even if you're the first in your family to choose healing, even if no one claps for you, your choice matters. You matter. And you're not alone.

#MentalHealth #change #CPTSD #healingjourney #soberiety #choices #TraumaRecovery #AddictionRecovery

Just another day of surviving C-PSTD. Everything looks good on the outside. But on the inside, my stomach is twisted, my nervous system is barely functioning from overuse, and my soul is deeply exhausted.

The other day I was triggered by an employee at the DMV who did nothing but her job. I spiraled hard that day, I screamed and cried for hours. It wasn't just about the missing paperwork. It was the fact that I was never guided on how to do life or how to navigate adulthood. So every time I come face to face with a obstacle, and it doesn't pan out - Triggered.

First, I feel the weight hit my chest, then my stomach starts to churn. Tears are inevitable. But it's not just sadness. It's blinding hot rage and anger. I went home and collapsed into screams and sobs. At one point, I yelled at the photos of my departed mother, I find it harder to feel empathy for her with each passing day. It's hard to describe what I'm feeling on the inside or what it's like to heal from everything I experienced, so I'll try, it's word vomit, plus real vomit with a tidal wave of emotions with only one way out. Eventually, I passed out from exhaustion. My afternoon naps - those are the only times I really sleep. At night, the real demons come. In the dark. Where the other monsters reside.

Healing is a rollercoaster in my life. One minute I would be perfectly fine. The next - chaos.

I've learned this: healing is step by step. You define what that looks like.

I've noticed a pattern: first the emotions explode, then I sit. Then my mind starts sorting the facts. I need timelines,. Logic. The 5 W's: who, what, when, where, why.Eventually both sides of me - the emotional and the logical - meet. I can begin to co-exist with what happened. In the present and the past. Because once the emotional attachment releases, it's just a fact about me. And facts can't hurt me the way memories do.

I remind myself daily, I am not broken, I am merely carrying more weight than anyone should. About this post... these words... I've held them in my soul far too long.

To the reader that made it this far, I see you and I see your pain. I hope that you find what's been missing and reclaim it as your own.

#CPTSD #healingjourney #TraumaRecovery #MentalHealth #youarenotalone