In response to Steve’s post..
So, the problem here is that by all indications my mind has some sort of intermittent fault. Despite my investment of (at a guess) $100,000-ish and a smaller but not insignificant investment by my parents into same, we have not found and fixed this fault. What we’ve mostly found out is that the state of our current health care system is awful.
Me, with everything working correctly, accepts $person’s decision. That’s who I want to be. I wish she didn’t want to not talk to me, but if that’s what she wants, it’s what she should have. I certainly wouldn’t want someone forcing their existence on me. However, from time to time, this intermittent fault arises. And, you have to remember also that until my most recent adventure the last time I had seen $person face to face she had been friendly and not been telling me to go away.
Well, when this intermittent fault arises, several things happen
1) Often, I have a period where from my perspective, I’m just not there at all. It looks to me like a blackout.
2) Once this ends, I have a time where I have a very hard time figuring out what is real and what isn’t. At times I’ve been convinced I’m a starship orbiting earth, for example. Now, I doubt if I’m going to have nearly as hard a time knowing that $person doesn’t want to see me now that I have memories of her talking about me in third person to a judge and enumerating all the reasons she doesn’t, but until this most recent adventure, all I had was email, and not a *lot* of email or a lot of detail in said email. For someone who has had the experience of hallucinating text without even being in a faulted state, this wasn’t that helpful.
3) A bunch of other people appear, from my perspective, to also be inhabiting my body. I can’t explain to you what this is like, but they appear to be having conversations with each other using my mouth. This is disorienting to say the least. I can often somewhat control their ability to do this, but not perfectly and I am often embarrassed, ashamed, and unhappy about what has transpired after I return to normal.
Now, this most recent fault occurred despite, as far as I know, 100% med compliance (i.e. taking Seroquel exactly as prescribed by my doctor) at the maximum dose I was permitted for the weeks leading up to it. I’m trying a new psych med now which *might* help, or might not.
Clearly, looking at #3, I can’t really blame people for finding my presence disorienting and/or disturbing. I don’t think I present any sort of danger of physical attack, but I’m definitely not *normal* in this state, and I and my stable of alters are likely to say things that normal people wouldn’t say. It is not nearly as simple as to say I am choosing this. Steve, I am guessing you are the sort of person who would think that we’re always deciding exactly what we’re doing, and I hope you never have to learn that this isn’t always the case by experiencing life as I do during one of these intermittent faults.
August 7th, 2015 at 1:29 pm
As I said before, I am still growing and learning. I am not faulting you for being who you are. We are all born as incomplete puzzles, with extra and missing pieces. We spend our life trading, throwing out and acquiring pieces we need to complete ourselves. Some of us, like myself have swapped out so many pieces, we have changed our original picture to be something else. It is part of life. You have done the same. But remember, all your alters are still part of who you are, you just need to integrate them into Jon, or Jon has to see things from a different point of view to make some of the alters non-relevant to the new Jon. I don’t know how that is done, it just seems logical. My post was directed at the baseline Jon, not the alters. Baseline Jon has more power than you give yourself credit for. Baseline Jon has more input/output than the alters. Perhaps Baseline Jon can integrate with the alter or justify the non-existence of the alter that drew you into the last situation. How do you teach and give maturity to an alter? Can another alter be influenced enough to provide Baseline Jon an ally to help with problems from a different alter? I feel compassion and sympathy for you, Baseline Jon, because you have parts of yourself that you don’t control. I have removed myself from people, places and situations so that good parts of myself would not be influenced and would have time to mature. I have also forced myself into uncomfortable situations to experience points of view that were necessary for me to experience so I could continue to grow. It has not been easy, but I feel I am a better person because of it…
August 11th, 2015 at 2:00 am
What you say here is remarkably close to what the current thinking about what to do about DID says. The tricky part is that most people with DID experience the alters coming forward (i.e. the blackouts, from my perspective) more often than once every six months. I clearly am the one with the most invested in my life – the one who has put in the time to learn the skills I have, the one with the most to lose if I were to, for example, be imprisoned.
August 11th, 2015 at 7:10 am
Have you discovered what triggers the emergence of your alters?