Discuss any issues you have with work. Things like, shifting at work, getting to work, interactions at work, not working, difficulties, etc.
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
Work is a gift for seven of us. Always has been. It’s like a playground. We love work and seven of us do seven completely different disciplines seven completely different ways. It’s one of the most expressive areas of our various selves and employers have always been fascinated with how one person can operate so many completely different disciplines with ease, just shifting back and forth between them and we are different in each one and each one knows exactly when it is their “playtime”. The last employer we had said the same thing the other few have said…’we would have to hire seven people to do what you do. We’ve never seen anything like it but we like it.’ Our worker parts have granted us a wonderful career and made so many other things possible. We can’t imagine work with just one part. We don’t work that way. Every now and then we can have a mistake at work where a little part that doesn’t belong in that environment makes a grand appearance with no warning. We have to negotiate those things and work with those things and get the worker-bots to be kind to the little-bots that chose to express themselves in a venue they were not supposed to attend other than quietly and in the background. We try to learn from those experiences and take a look at why there was an ‘accidental’ invasion of the mind snatchers at work outside of the normal seven of us that work. Work is just this huge gift, this huge playground for seven of us that work incredibly well as a team. Totally fun and it is very hard to shut work off. It’s just a huge, huge playground and we all absolutely love it. Always have. We love the range of things we get to do.
Wow PJ – sounds amazing what you can do! It makes me wonder how I do things. I think I can do a lot of different things. I haven’t thought about it a ton – but sometimes I do, and I seem to surprise myself with how many different things I do that are work-related or hobbies or skills or whatever. I often don’t talk about some of the skills that I have because I’m afraid to annoy people. There are some who think I already can do a lot of things – so to tell them any more, well, I don’t want to lose any more friends than I have to. On the other hand, I have learned not to downplay myself as much as I used to either. I shouldn’t do less than I’m capable of, just because of my own fears of annoying people.
Also, with work – I find that even if I can hardly get myself there on some days because I’m doing so poorly, or am shifted and struggling to get present so I can go to work – even on those days – once I get to work, it’s like ‘boom’! Just about as soon as I walk through the door frame that puts me into my work building (which is several different places by the way), it’s like I’m ‘on’, and all a sudden, I’m ok. It’s weird. It weirds me out that this happens! Somehow it does though – a lot!
Enough thoughts for now. Thanks for sharing. Interesting.
….. thinking some more….. the other side of this though – is that I’ve also had time frames of being VERY unable to work. A couple years here and a couple years there. I had started really struggling; couldn’t focus, strange things crossing my mind so I could hardly even see straight, shifting, leaving early because I was starting to totally break down….. oi! I’m so thankful to be out of that for the most part now.
During that though – it was hard to reconcile how well I could do things one moment, and how little I could do the next moment.
i really relate to what chariots said. i’ve had times where the main parts out were really totally *NOT COPING*, but then i’d walk into work, or class, and all of a sudden, there i was, totally together, apparently doing really well.
my therapist said recently that this trait is probably what made it so hard to get help from therapists or friends. because apparently, singletons who go through severe depression aren’t able to do that switch and completely lose the symptoms.
anyhow, it does sometimes make me feel guilty, that i can do things really well at one point, and then not at a different point. now that i know it’s parts, i still feel guilty. i mean, if there is a part of me who is good at something, then why can’t the other parts do that equally well? why can’t i just have the “right” part out for every situation, all the time?
and i think that’s a big part of why i haven’t been able to work for a while–because the parts who weren’t the “right” (responsible, together, not-needing-help) ones weren’t getting a chance to heal. and with my particular system, it seems to have required pretty much a total breakdown in order to allow things to stop functioning in a way that keeps parts from being able to heal.
i joke about this with one of my friends, who had to drop out of grad school because of chronic fatigue. i was managing grad school with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. i was able to continue functioning, despite the fact that my body was doing everything it could to slow me down. it wasn’t until i was trying to juggle that *plus* the fact that the smoothly-functioning (undiagnosed) DID broke down into less-smoothly-functioning DID that i finally had to slow down.
Hmmm…I agree with Jigsaw and Chariots. There are times where it seems impossible to focus long enough to work. We’ve encountered those and we deal with them successfully sometimes and not successfully other times. There are times where we’re a mess before work but once we get in the parking lot and walk in the door, it’s like a giant switch and everything is fine as long as we stay super busy. Sometimes, we have an issue with maintaining focus after therapy for a couple of days. Here’s what we decided to do and so far it’s working. We rearranged the schedule of what we do on those “hard to focus days”. The day of therapy, the administration worker-part concentrates all of their work in that day so it’s just task, execute, routine, task, execute. You don’t really have to think too terribly much. That particular administration part knows their routines and they just drive ’em. We don’t think or feel a thing on therapy days until we get home and then you can see all manner of dysfunction. Just track the trails of expression and incomplete tasks all through the house. The three days of the week before therapy, we focus on those parts that enjoy creativity, advertising and marketing, training staff and interactions with other people. Administrative days, we’re not as user friendly with people, we’re more closed because it is so hard to focus and requires routines. The professional parts that meet with clients or staff DO NOT do so on the two days following therapy, for example. We set the schedule of who does what to coordinate with what we know are triggers. We have quiet office days of routines and tasks and we have interactive, dynamic, open days we’ve built with our staff and teams at work. For us, it’s a matter of knowing our triggers, working with them and building our work schedules/responsibilities around those. Don’t know if that helps or not, but that’s what we do. Again, we’re not always successful, but where this is a mistake we make, we own it, we’re responsible for it and we try as an internal team to understand it and creatively adapt to the needs of the part expressing the “uh oh” thing.