Feel free to comment below on any of the topics from the October meeting:
1) Resilience
2) How crazy the rest of the world seems to be (even though I’m the one with DID!)
3) Help vs. Rescue
4) The past – fears of repeating it
5) Relationships – alters not feeling similar about an external person(s)
6) Sleep – can you sleep and others be up?
7) Venting
8.) Dealing with others who are in denial – particularly, denial of their own multiplicity
9) How do I know if it’s an alter or hypomania (causing this feeling/change)? Does it really even matter?
Thinking about what if it’s hypomania, or something like that… I think it *does* matter if there’s something other than DID going on. I tend to check with people outside of me when I’m concerned. Especially my therapist, obviously, since she’s the professional and all. So last year, when I had a big change in stuff (got less depressed) but went pretty quickly from the depressed parts being out a lot (most) of the time, to them feeling some relief and stepping back and being replaced with a really energetic, optimistic part… well, mostly that felt good, but i also kind of worried if it meant i wasn’t really happy but instead i had something like bipolar going on. but my therapist said that the part with all the optimism and ideas and energy didn’t actually get out of touch with reality or anything, and wasn’t… i dunno. i guess just wasn’t manic to someone who knows what manic looks like. so i guess that made sense. and it does fit with that part, it’d just been so long since she was around much that it was hard to know.
it’s funny, with the hypomania/DID thing… when i was home last, my mom and older sister were describing experiencing something almost exactly like that. my mom just accepts that she will go through “phases” where she feels different ways, and has different moods associated with those phases. my sister decided she was bipolar (and lots of other things) and drugs the heck out of herself. but what they described really seemed more like DID to me. They’re not the ones who irk me with their denial of DID, but they *are* why it took me so long to recognize what was going on with *me*, since they (and the rest of my family) are really far over on the dissociative spectrum. Actually, so are a lot of my friends, although none of them except one is probably multiple. I mean, the friends I had before I knew I was multiple, since I think of at least a few people in this group as friends! 🙂
But the reason i would be concerned if it were something like hypomania or something else that’s not DID is the goal is to fix the things that are wrong… and something like bipolar, for instance, would need some different treatments (like meds) than if it is something related to DID. and i really want to get healthy for real, and not be on too much of a roller coster.
Um, coaster. I’ll leave it how whoever that was typed it, but I wanted to make sure it was understood. 🙂
For me, it’s been recognizing that things I’d assumed were quirks from DID might be evidence of a physical disorder. And that needs a different treatment than if the stuff is mental, you know? Not quite sure what, since it’s turning out that the medications available aren’t necessarily going to help much, but still. I approach something physical a little differently than something that is solely mental.
On the other hand, it’s all just tools. I mean, it’s all just a matter of finding tools to feel better, and so it might be possible to feel better without knowing the exact diagnosis.
#9 – I think I’d have a hard time not trying to figure out if it’s an alter or hypomania. It seems important to me too. At the same time I feel like if it’s important to know, it will be clear – or over time that particular alter will keep appearing, if it’s a real alter, or if it didn’t get recognized enough to deal with it’s issues. So eventually I’ll know.
#5 – definitely have a hard time with different alters feeling different ways about our spouse. 1 or 2 of us married him and the other 20ish didn’t! So they don’t feel married to him. Especially the younger ones, which is most of our system – they aren’t old enough to be married! It’s definitely an issue at times. It also makes me want to hide more around my husband, if I am shifting – the sense that he should be interacting with his wife – not all the kids. But we talk about it, etc. It’s just a work in progress all around
With being “married”… our approach is that we, collectively, are a family with W. It helps that there were the years before I knew I was a “we”, and a lot of different parts had built up relationships with W. So are we all “married”? Um… hard to say. We’re all committed to the monogamous relationship, so we wouldn’t go out and date someone else, so to that extent, yes, we’re all married to her. And we’re all family with her.
One of the funny things is, as early as our second date, we would do things like go to toy stores and pick out a toy to keep. And she would play with my toys and finger paint and all of that. So different parts interacting with her was an element of the relationship from the get-go. And that works well for us, maybe because it means that everyone has an investment in being in this relationship.
Frankly, for us, marriage is mostly not about sex. I mean, yeah, there’s sex, and only a few parts do that. But most of the relationship is about connecting with the other person, and for me and W, that means we need to connect with all of the different parts of each other.
Some of my thinking is, most people have some element of multiplicity. Not necessarily DID, but lots of people have different parts, and so it’s just that my different parts are a little more separate. And my relationship with W is happier when we can connect on a lot of different levels. Even though we didn’t know I was *this* multiple, I think it was the combination of parts that brought me and W together, so it wouldn’t make sense to block certain parts from interacting with her.
#5 Again – we just had a sort of “sit-down” and tried to go over facts. We have one body, this body is 38 and female, and it is married to our partner. It is not realistic for some alters to live with our partner and others not to. We all are constrained by our physical limitations. Our partner is willing to be family to all of us and tries and wants to. As awkward as this feels to me …….
ok that’s as far as I can get right now…. was just trying to find the “ground”, the base truth that we have to operate out of. Basically – everyone can’t have what they want. It is impossible. We have to figure out how to live with that.
@Chariots: Is there a way of getting everyone a little closer to what they want?
I’m just wondering… my system doesn’t do well with “living with” things that make some of us unhappy. It tends to generate a lot of conflict and depression for us. But we *have* found ways that get us all happier. Kind of like the separate bedrooms thing–that made such a HUGE difference, and while it was upsetting to parts who felt like they “should” sleep in the same room as W, the relief for the parts who wanted nothing to do with sharing a bedroom was phenomenal, and made it worthwhile. (And, in our case, even the parts who felt like they “should” share a bed with W were happier, because we sleep better in our own bed!)
I guess what I’m saying is that, in my system, it’s turned out that things that seemed impossible actually had solutions, and it reduced depression and internal conflict so much that the compromise was worth it. I guess for us it came down to figuring out what each part’s most important thing was, and finding ways of giving them that. But it took a lot of different tries before we got it right.
Definitely agree that there are solutions and possible things. But there are some things that are just not possible if we want any sanity at all – such as a younger part going and finding and living with her own “family”. Getting her own mom or dad or something. It’s just not realistic. Or my teen going and buying a truck and thinking we can afford that. Also not realistic.
Definitely agree that there are solutions though, agreements that can and should be made. But ultimately they/we have to realize there are limits. We are limited by having one body, etc.