TraumaRecovery

"I’ve regained my mind and my voice, and along with it, my silence and my choice."

How My Silence Became My Power

#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #TraumaRecovery #ComplexPosttraumaticStressDisorder #Abuse #Trauma #Recovery #MentalHealth #PTSD

If you want a recovery-focused "30 Days of Dissociative Identity Disorder" survey that delves deeper… here it is!

Tried to think of all the questions we want to ask those further along in recovery. Tried to think of questions focusing on progress and change.

Questions going beyond surface fascination and basic comprehension. Questions introspective and reflective of the overall journey. Questions whose answers may offer hope, perspective, or insight to a beginner survivor.

Feel free to share with your various communities and fellow survivors!

#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #DissociationDisorders #dissociativedisorders #TraumaRecovery

Motley’s Thirty Questions

I want more content about moving beyond what makes Dissociative Identity Disorder so difficult. Stuff that shows what happens after survival comes to an end. What happens on the other side of recovery. What’s possible. And how to get there.

I want to hear from the survivors who clawed their way from low-to-high functioning. To hear from the fully-fused multiples, and what their internal experience is like compared to highly integrated multiplicity.

I want to hear from those who consider themselves no longer disordered. Who have resolved their PTSD. Those who found meaning in their trauma histories and the healing paths they took. Who found meaning in their life outside the scope of diagnosis and recovery.

I want to hear from the survivors who have found their peace and their purpose. Who are breaking the curse and ending the cycles. The torch-bearers. The light-bringers. The ones who know the way out of the dark.

Recovered DID survivors are out there, living their hard-won lives. Not all are writers or artists, and not every survivor wants to put their story out there, and I respect that. I understand it.

But I see the gap. And I want to do something about it.

#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #MentalHealth #TraumaRecovery

Have you shared your diagnosis with anyone outside of your care team? If so, who and why? How often do you switch? How often do you lose time? Talk a little about what dissociation is like for you.

*** 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