It's hard to believe that this time last year, I thought Dissociative Identity Disorder was a diagnosis reserved for "properly crazy" people with serious brain damage and a childhood of horrific trauma. That sounds harsh, but if that's what a smart girl with a psychology degree believed, imagine what the average Joe thinks. Granted, I had been aiming for a lifetime achievement award of "COMPLETE AND UTTER SANITY - NO CRAZY PERSON HERE" which meant avoiding all references to clinical or forensic psychology, keeping everyone at the end of a long stick, and being fine just fine thanks for asking. Dissociation wasn't in my vocabulary until Candycan showed up on the NHS Choices blog and I started to wonder why on earth our experiences were so similar, since our disorders were obviously so different. In a way, reading her blogs have been more valuable than therapy, because it's helped me face aspects of myself that I would normally have avoided, obsessively controlled, or outright denied.
The (good) leading researchers on dissociation and trauma refer to dissociative identity disorder as an attachment disorder. It happens when the chronic and severe trauma or neglect is caused by a primary caregiver, you know, the person who should be protecting you rather than hurting you. I suppose that's the ultimate betrayal. But not everyone who experiences trauma develops DID. The reactant in this chemical equation is pressure to deny those bad times resulting in the persistent emotional neglect of the developing child.
I'm not entirely sure where the similarities end between me and Candy. I don't feel like I have multiple identities or personalities. I habitually dissociate most of my emotions which makes having relationships quite difficult. Some days I'm utterly in love with my husband. Some days I'm terrified about the stranger who wants to touch me. I KNOW he's my husband. But for some reason, the feelings that should go with it (familiarity, intimacy, love, attachment, desire) aren't often there.
I like to think there are no splits in my cognition, that it is all purely emotional, but I've noticed that my rapidly changing needs correlates to my rapidly changing behaviour: voice, vocabulary, abilities. Would I have noticed this sooner if my husband wasn't so childish and playful himself? It's ironic, but he fell in love with the child part. The child part loves him to death. It's the adult part's turn to be lonely.
I can see why my therapists have been so adamant about getting me to just be me. Maybe if I loosen the reigns, we can start to see the extent of my dissociative disorder. I am so obsessively afraid of losing control, that I can't bear to let anything go through without my approval. I can barely talk about my parts without thinking "I must be wrong. How could I think that? No one will believe me. That's crazy talk. It's just metaphors. You're only using an analogy, right? There's nothing wrong with you. You must be hypochondriac. You don't know anything. Your experience is wrong. You are wrong. [Insert self-hatred here]"
I don't even need to think a single word. They are all stored somewhere, with the hatred, guilt and doubt, in a magic bullet of introjected abuse. It happens in an instant, and I'm left with increasing anxiety as I continue to push myself to accept the TRUTH of MY experience and MY feelings.
I'm sick of this mental self-harming. I'll never take off my super-shield of dissociation unless I stop showering myself with Stigma bullets.
Can we work our way backwards? Maybe treating ourselves with compassion means letting ourselves be crazy.
"I am so obsessively afraid of losing control, that I can't bear to let anything go through without my approval"
ReplyDeleteI know how this feels. It can be really hard to let go of control because there's the risk that things will go in ways that aren't conducive to your 'normal' life... and the whole point of having parts in the first place is to help you be able to have a normal life.
"Maybe treating ourselves with compassion means letting ourselves be crazy." I think you are right here. But like me, you work and appear to have an apparantly well functioning life. Don't you find it is hard to get the balance between letting go of control and losing the ability to do the things you need to do in life to be able to continue working?
"I like to think there are no splits in my cognition" I like to think this too and it's something I still struggle with a lot, but my T always seems to be able to point out the ways in which they are there. It's hard to believe it though when you are a part that feels they are 'all seeing'. It's hard to even doubt that you might not be.
Lastly and not leastly, you have no idea how happy it makes us to read that my blog has been helpful to someone in some way. :)
Thanks Candy -- I was worried you'd be freaked out, but that could just be me projecting. I feel freaked out. It was a hard session last week.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pretty harsh trade-off. My last Tx was super-experienced and immediately honed in on the split. But she also really pushed me (the Adult part) to let the child part out and that just made my controlling part angry/defensive and my child part terrified of her!
Now my current Tx doesn't push at all, just focuses on building up the trust/attachment and asking me how I feel. So, the child part wants to attach but the controlling part knows that she'll never be the mother we want so much. And maybe a little jealous, because I've been doing that mother job on my own for so long. I don't understand what is so important about other people?
And I wish I could talk like this to her. She's my therapist, after all, but I guess I don't believe she will accept me, not fully. I know all of the parts are me. But they don't feel like me. And I don't know how I can admit to how I feel, truly, because how I feel is crazy.