How do you give your people/parts what they need if you don’t have much time? …. or even if time isn’t a factor…. how do you give them what they need?
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
This was my question and my problem. People in the group threw out several ideas – most of which were internal sorts of things. So I suppose the need to live in a parallel universe comes into play here. I need to be able to go to work or whatever – and be having internal conversations and life going on inside at the same time. This is hard for me as I tend to avoid the inside stuff and discount it so easily. But I suffer if I avoid it all together too. It is easier for me to have time for them to be out and do things – rather than to set aside rooms for playing inside somehow. …. though, it kinda seems that the reverse would be easier, logically.
I don’t know – it seems like my aliens need space out. Or I just shut them in all together.
i know that a lot of my parts prefer getting time in the outside world. i guess the best analogy is that it’s like the difference between reading a really good restaurant review and actually going to the restaurant. yeah, reading the review is nice, but it’s not at all the same as actually going there in my physical body. or the same kind of thing with watching a travel program on tv.
it’s hard to manage, and there are times when things just aren’t going to work out very well. like, if there are things in real life that absolutely have to get done, the parts who don’t want to, or can’t be involved in what’s happening get kind of pushed back. but that can only happen for so long before things erupt. so i’m learning to make time, and i think other parts are also learning to make time for each other.
in a lot of ways, what works best (in the sense that there are fewer meltdowns, not in the sense that it works really well) is to act as though the internal parts have the same kind of needs as if they were outside. but it’s more like being in this massive more-than-three-legged race, or being conjoined quintuplets. we don’t always get along, and different ones of us have really very different needs.
i don’t know how it works in systems where one part alone has the ability to shut out the others. within my system, groups of parts can shut off other groups of parts, but there’s still going to be switching, because no one part has the ability to shut off all the other ones. so it’s more about learning how to cooperate and communicate, because even if we can pretend the problem isn’t there, the switching keeps on happening. i don’t think any one part has ever been around on their own for more than a day or two without switching. and while parts might have their ideas about when this is or isn’t a good thing, it’s still something that happens.