How do you include/exclude your parts in decision making – and how does that effect your decisions?
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
I don’t inclue or exclude my parts in decision making. Whoever is out just makes decisions, without consulting anyone else.
Actually, now that I just wrote that, I realize that there is one part who is the decision-maker. She just makes decisions, without consulting anyone. But she isn’t excluding anyone, either. She just makes decisions that are best for the system as a whole. There is no inner dialogue on decisions. So far, this has proved to be beneficial, as the one who makes the decisions has good judgment, even when others of us don’t. The decision-maker keeps us safe, even when someone else is upset and might make bad decisions if left to her own devices.
I hadn’t thought about this until I saw the question on decision-making. I do know that several people have commented to me over the years that I have no trouble making decisions, and that I don’t hem and haw, but just decide something and move on. I never before realized that it was just one part of me that did that. My decision-making capability is one of the more functional aspects of my system.
wish i could say the same! there are certain “default” decisions, things that are compromise choices. those work, kind of, except they are a compromise, which means no one is entirely happy with them, but no one is entirely unhappy either. like with what to wear, or eat, or stuff like that. and if we stick to the routine, at least we don’t have to think about choices.
i guess the adults in the system used to make choices for everyone, or made choices as though they were the only ones. they got a lot of headaches, too! which is to say, there was a lot of feedback that other parts didn’t agree with the choices, but they just didn’t know how to listen. since being diagnosed, and even more so since the adults have been blocked, it’s been a little harder to juggle everyone’s needs/wants/preferences. some things we do because they need to get done, but the rest of the time, if we don’t listen, then other parts kind of interfere and make it difficult or impossible to do the thing they object to. so we have to try to communicate, which works better at some times than others.
several of the littles have been very talkative about cooperation, and are very proud when we can do that. and things do work better when we’re able to do that. but it’s hard, because a lot of the time, it’s like we all want to go off in very different directions, and doing the thing one part wants necessarily means not immediately doing the thing another part wants, and so forth. so it’s a struggle, and we’re still not sure how to make it work.
lists, says someone–and it’s true. sometimes we make a list of all the different things parts want, and then we kind of work on coming to agreement about the order or the priority or stuff like that.
and we have some parts who can make an argument for why their thing is more important, or for why we have to do something no one exactly wants, so we can have an outcome we all want (like riding the subway, even though lots of parts dislike it, because we *do* want to get to therapy or home; or doing the laundry, even though it takes several hours, because we *do* want to have clean clothes).