Talk about making use of a journal (or how you haven’t been able to make use of one).
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
Talk about making use of a journal (or how you haven’t been able to make use of one).
journaling has been huge for us. we’ve done it since high school, and i don’t know how many we’ve written since then. i don’t know how or why we picked up a pad of paper and started writing our thoughts, but we did. i guess we had a need. a need to keep track. a need to not lose thoughts. putting things on paper (or the computer now too) stops things from flying around in my head so much. it’s like super balls bouncing around in my brain – and when i write, they quiet down. i don’t have to try to remember important things if i write them down. i stop worrying. and somehow it makes the untouchable, a little more concrete and touchable. dreams, ideas, images, to-do lists, nightmares, daymares, whatever….. we write a lot of things down….. and it settles the superballs so we can sleep or work or do the things we need/want to do. it also helps our therapist know what’s going on too – to read our journal in sessions. helps us communicate.
for us, it’s a need. it feels like we *have* to write sometimes. sometimes it’s like barfing – and once we’ve barfed/written – we feel relief. sorry if that sounds disgusting.
Ditto on that entire description. Journaling is a great calming influence for the super balls and does help focus. Sometimes we don’t remember what is written and we have to go back and read it so that helps too. Sometimes there are too many things and too many parts speaking so we use journaling as a free for all and then have to go back and discern who said what and you can find the patterns and recognize a lot about everyone inside from those journals. Sometimes if it is going too fast we use the computer and it is just this automated writing thing. You have no cognition of what is being typed or what is going on in the environment around you. It’s just this zone kind of thing and it helps everyone on the inside understand one another when we go back and read it. Sometimes it takes a long time to work through something like a major decision and we’ll set up a journal board with paper on the wall and let everyone write their own thing in their own color and we have lots of different handwritings and spelling things on that paper but everyone gets to say what they want or draw what they want to say and we learn a lot about who has what handwriting or likes what color or draws a certain way or needs help spelling if it is a little part. Usually a bigger part can tell you what they are trying to say or the little part will just out right tell you when you ask them. It’s a helpful communication and learning tool and we’ve all kind of learned to appreciate one another with it in many ways and it certainly does settle the super balls. Really helps with focus on what we have to do with work and home. Really helps with getting everyone to work as a team when they understand another’s opinion, young or old. It’s a good thing.
journaling, in my system, is massively complicated. on the one hand, we use lots of different methods–handwriting, writing on the computer, blogging, bulletin boards… different ways of getting words onto paper. and it does help different ones of us to sort through our thoughts, or to communicate with each other, or stuff like that.
on the other hand, there’s the terror we have about writing things down in any clear or explicit way. we’ve been working on this one for a while. but when i was growing up, pretty much anything you wrote down carried the risk of someone in the family finding it, reading it, and then… well, not so good. best-case scenario is teasing you about it. worst-case, well, not gonna go there. it meant absolutely not writing down anything in a way that someone else could understand it. so i wrote a lot of fiction, and wrote a lot of poetry, and wrote a lot of really cryptic stuff that absolutely obscured what i was talking about.
i’ve been working on that issue for twelve years or so now, and it’s still hard a lot of the time to get direct and concrete in what i write, and there are a lot of parts who start to feel panic as soon as i pick up a pen or pencil, and to a lesser degree, as soon as i begin to type. they associate writing things down with extreme danger and vulnerability, and do what they can to sabotage that process.
the other thing with journaling is that many parts kind of keep a level of privacy going on, so that other parts just plain won’t see what someone else has written down. even in my paper journals, looking back over them, i can now see some things that it’s astounding i never noticed back when i was using those particular journals. like, on the same page, or on adjacent pages, there were several different handwritings, and different parts talking in their distinctive “voices,” and yet… i somehow didn’t notice it was going on, and never even saw the things the others had written. not to mention discovering journals i completely didn’t remember had existed. but then, i’ve always had several different journals going on simultaneously, too.
so for me, journaling is as likely to make things more chaotic and upset as it is to make things calm down. but at the same time, i’ve had this drive towards self-expression for a long time, and i’m pretty practiced at it by now. i guess one advantage of having wanted to be a writer since i was a kid is that by practicing something consistently for a couple of decades, you actually start to do it pretty well.