This months topics to discuss!
- Kids – parenting both internal and external kids, the desire/ability to have external kids or not
- Conflict resolution between alters
- How to relax without dissociating
- The experience of shifting: paralysis inbetween, the difficulty of coming back to the surface after sessions or after shifting, the need to have space and time to come back
- Planning for the possibility of shifting in various circumstances
We are dealing with a hard time right now. My partner and I have wanted kids for as long as either one of us remembers. We were going to start seven years ago, but then I pretty much had a nervous breakdown and wound up getting diagnosed with DID. So we took some time for me to get to a more stable place, and then we took some more time because we decided it was a bad idea to have kids before we had a really good support system.
All of that was finally in place this year, and we started trying (we’re both women, so trying took some extra effort!). And W got pregnant, and we were so happy, and everyone who we told was so happy for us.
And then she had a miscarriage. And that is really hard and painful, because we wanted that baby so much.
There are some good things that came out of that experience, though. One thing is that everyone who we told, people who know us pretty well–all of them thought it was great, even the ones who know I’m multiple. They know we’ve done the emotional work to be really great parents. So it’s good to know we weren’t just telling ourselves that.
And the other thing is that when the miscarriage happened, and everyone inside of me was so devastated, it was really clear that *all* of my parts wanted to have a kid. There wasn’t ambivalence about it. I had worried that I was just believing the other parts were as excited as I was, and fooling myself into ignoring their feelings about it. But what became clear was that we all want to have kids.
We’re going to be trying again, hopefully soon, but it’s still painful to have lost the baby we were going to have.
Jigsaw analogy, im sorry she miscarried. That is very sad. It happened to me too. Take care…