definitions

Question:

Wow. I love it when you go all brilliant like that. I printed it out to send to my sister, and to read myself over and over. Thanks . Tess — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

Response:

Hi Coney silence, I appreciate what you wrote here. I very much agree that we are each unique, and equally worthy of caring and support, regardless of where we might fit on some theoretical scale. I do think it is important for each of us to try to figure out how we work, for our own healing and safety. I think when one is new to the exploration, it is difficult not to try to do this, at least in part, by looking at others and seeing how one is similar/different from them. I strongly agree that to the extent this must be done, it should be done solely in an a search for information mode – never to put ourself or another in a position of less/more worth. Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful piece. Take care, hikers – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a human. And humans are complex. Madly wonderfully dizzyingly complex. And how you heal will be, if you are lucky to have a therapist who cares and teaches and listens and learns, your own path, your own life. You are human first. You are dissociative second. I don’t mean to devalue the search for understanding your dissociation. I don’t mean to demean the doctors and researchers who try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. And I am not trying to rob you of your right to get caught up in the same pitfalls I have been through. But I thought it might help to know that others have been down this particular road as well, and that the knowledge of where some of the bumps in the road are will keep you from getting as many scraped knees and shorten some of the wrong turnings so that you can focus on what is really important. You. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * "no one has the power to own another human" Lionheart

– For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

Response:

Hi Coney silence, I appreciate what you wrote here. I very much agree that we are each unique, and equally worthy of caring and support, regardless of where we might fit on some theoretical scale.

Thanks for responding. I’m glad it had some resonance. I do think it is important for each of us to try to figure out how we work, for our own healing and safety. I think when one is new to the exploration, it is difficult not to try to do this, at least in part, by looking at others and seeing how one is similar/different from them.

Absolutely, I agree. I think that it is completely human and normal to do this. I think it is part of how ppl learn. Whether you are learning to paint, or doing math, or whatever the new process. I just remember how wound up I got in the comparisons, and same for others struggling with their dx, and I think on and off for a long time that it got in the way of trusting my self and my own healing process. I strongly agree that to the extent this must be done, it should be done solely in an a search for information mode – never to put ourself or another in a position of less/more worth.

Yes, that is the part that I think is so damaging. Too much of my life has been judged by others and I think I learned how to judge every breath, almost, very young. I think the judgement part is as destructive as almost any of it, cause it makes us sort of frozen when we aren’t busy judging ourselves harshly. It is sort of the opposite of choice, maybe. Hard to feel free to make choices when you are sure that what you are and do is always wrong. Ok, I have horrible cold that seems to be sneaking it’s way into my lungs and my brain is mushy so I am signing off. byeeeee, b. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful piece. Take care, hikers I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold

Response:

Jeepers. Brilliant even. Hah, someone inside thinks that’s cool. Thanks. Really good to see you surfacing here. Gonna stick around? It is neat to see some of the ancient ones back again. (referring, of course, only to longevity at asd, not rl years) b. Wow. I love it when you go all brilliant like that. I printed it out to send to my sister, and to read myself over and over. Thanks . Tess — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

– For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

Response:

Hi again! – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hi Coney silence, I appreciate what you wrote here. I very much agree that we are each unique, and equally worthy of caring and support, regardless of where we might fit on some theoretical scale. Thanks for responding. I’m glad it had some resonance. I do think it is important for each of us to try to figure out how we work, for our own healing and safety. I think when one is new to the exploration, it is difficult not to try to do this, at least in part, by looking at others and seeing how one is similar/different from them. Absolutely, I agree. I think that it is completely human and normal to do this. I think it is part of how ppl learn. Whether you are learning to paint, or doing math, or whatever the new process. I just remember how wound up I got in the comparisons, and same for others struggling with their dx, and I think on and off for a long time that it got in the way of trusting my self and my own healing process.

<nodding Glad you aren’t there anymore! I strongly agree that to the extent this must be done, it should be done solely in an a search for information mode – never to put ourself or another in a position of less/more worth. Yes, that is the part that I think is so damaging. Too much of my life has been judged by others and I think I learned how to judge every breath, almost, very young. I think the judgement part is as destructive as almost any of it, cause it makes us sort of frozen when we aren’t busy judging ourselves harshly. It is sort of the opposite of choice, maybe. Hard to feel free to make choices when you are sure that what you are and do is always wrong.

Agree completely. Shuts down options. World becomes very narrow. This is something that I am trying to work on. Like conversing with you – your thoughts often feel like a mirror at a slightly different angle to mine…. Ok, I have horrible cold that seems to be sneaking it’s way into my lungs and my brain is mushy so I am signing off.

Ack – we are alike in other ways too! I am home from work today – cold into my lungs, ouchey cough – yucky stuff coming up. Bleck! Hope you feel better soon, hikers – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – byeeeee, b. Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful piece. Take care, hikers I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hi again! Hi Coney silence, I appreciate what you wrote here. I very much agree that we are each unique, and equally worthy of caring and support, regardless of where we might fit on some theoretical scale. Thanks for responding. I’m glad it had some resonance. I do think it is important for each of us to try to figure out how we work, for our own healing and safety. I think when one is new to the exploration, it is difficult not to try to do this, at least in part, by looking at others and seeing how one is similar/different from them. Absolutely, I agree. I think that it is completely human and normal to do this. I think it is part of how ppl learn. Whether you are learning to paint, or doing math, or whatever the new process. I just remember how wound up I got in the comparisons, and same for others struggling with their dx, and I think on and off for a long time that it got in the way of trusting my self and my own healing process. <nodding Glad you aren’t there anymore!

Yeah, now it is just all the other things in my life I have to learn to trust and be compassionate about. One step forward, pause….one step forward….sigh, one step forward…sit down. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I strongly agree that to the extent this must be done, it should be done solely in an a search for information mode – never to put ourself or another in a position of less/more worth. Yes, that is the part that I think is so damaging. Too much of my life has been judged by others and I think I learned how to judge every breath, almost, very young. I think the judgement part is as destructive as almost any of it, cause it makes us sort of frozen when we aren’t busy judging ourselves harshly. It is sort of the opposite of choice, maybe. Hard to feel free to make choices when you are sure that what you are and do is always wrong. Agree completely. Shuts down options. World becomes very narrow. This is something that I am trying to work on. Like conversing with you – your thoughts often feel like a mirror at a slightly different angle to mine….

It is funny, but sometimes they are at an angle to myself as well. It is strange to read something I wrote a few days after the fact. Sometimes I know it is not just me writing, that some of the others inside are helping. But yeah, I know what you mean about the world becoming narrow. It seems like, sometimes, it feels safer to keep it narrow, even if it is painful and hurting. That too much of the sun will bl*nd me or something. It makes me sad that this is so, but I see it happen to us quite often. Ok, I have horrible cold that seems to be sneaking it’s way into my lungs and my brain is mushy so I am signing off. Ack – we are alike in other ways too! I am home from work today – cold into my lungs, ouchey cough – yucky stuff coming up. Bleck! Hope you feel better soon, hikers

Thanks. You too. I am taking every herbal and standard remedy I can get my hands on. Goldenseal, echinecea, garlic, zinc, vitamin e, sudaphed(however you spell it), and chicken soup. I’m still sick, but believing that I’ll get better sooner. Or I’ll be the healthiest sick person on the block. b. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – byeeeee, b. Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful piece. Take care, hikers I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood

Response:

: Jeepers. Brilliant even. Hah, someone inside thinks that’s cool. Yes – I don’t know how long it took you to write, but I envy and feel inspired by your fluid expression of subtle ideas. Not to mention your empathy. Pats on the back all around to you. : Thanks. Really good to see you surfacing here. Gonna stick around? I dunno. I try to, every time I resurface, but then something happens inside – not sure what – and I crawl back into the woodwork. Like needing something but I don’t want to admit that I need it. Confused, always confused. : It is : neat to see some of the ancient ones back again. (referring, of course, : only to longevity at asd, not rl years) Heh. We are feeling pretty ancient these days, in rl years . Just within the last week or two, a very tearful and disappointed 14-year-old inside realized that she’s walking around with a 42-year-old face that exhibits signs of hard living. Anyway, it’s neat to be back. For however long I’m here this time . Tess V. : b. :

: : Wow. I love it when you go all brilliant like that. I printed it out to : send to my sister, and to read myself over and over. Thanks . : : Tess : : — : For more information about this service, send e-mail to: : : : : : — : For more information about this service, send e-mail to: : — — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

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Took about an hour or so. I get this stuff inside and it just flows out. Seriously, like this weird hazy thing happens around me and we just start writing and out it comes. I think the deal is that really this thinking has been going on for a long time and finally when it bursts out it seems really easy. But it is working around inside for a long time before that. I think. : Thanks. Really good to see you surfacing here. Gonna stick around? I dunno. I try to, every time I resurface, but then something happens inside – not sure what – and I crawl back into the woodwork. Like needing something but I don’t want to admit that I need it. Confused, always confused.

Yeah, I understand, sorta. For me it seems to be this back and forth thing where I push myself out into rl for a while, or get pushed by circumstances, and there is little time or energy to read or write here. Eventually tho, I feel so out of touch with myself, and so hard edged, that I need to come back and be where it feels safe and caring. It is like I come back to find myself, in a way. Me, the original yo-yo grrllll. : It is : neat to see some of the ancient ones back again. (referring, of course, : only to longevity at asd, not rl years) Heh. We are feeling pretty ancient these days, in rl years . Just within the last week or two, a very tearful and disappointed 14-year-old inside realized that she’s walking around with a 42-year-old face that exhibits signs of hard living.

Ouch ouch ouch. Yes, have had variations on this. Very painful. I’m sorry. This face is 45 and shows it all too well. Can’t even dwell on this topic for long, too painful. Anyway, it’s neat to be back. For however long I’m here this time . Tess V.

Glad you are here, for however long. b. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – : b. : : : Wow. I love it when you go all brilliant like that. I printed it out to : send to my sister, and to read myself over and over. Thanks . : : Tess : : — : For more information about this service, send e-mail to: : : : : : — : For more information about this service, send e-mail to: : — — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

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CS ppls, Thank you for this and pls have it added to the FAQ postings *smile* Masters Chorus — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

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trusting self, what a concept Yes, that is the part that I think is so damaging. Too much of my life has been judged by others and I think I learned how to judge every breath, almost, very young. I think the judgement part is as destructive as almost any of it, cause it makes us sort of frozen when we aren’t busy judging ourselves harshly. It is sort of the opposite of choice, maybe. Hard to feel free to make choices when you are sure that what you are and do is always wrong.

Yes! This has been so much my problem lately, feeling so certain that everything I am and everything I have done or could do is has been and will be Wrong. Paralyzing. But if we’re so good at being wrong at things, maybe we’re wrong about being wrong . My acting coach used to constantly urge against self- consciousness. ‘You can’t perform and judge your performance at the same time, so drop the judgement! It’s not your job to judge yourself, other people will do more than enough of that for you. Just let yourself Be there and the rest will fall into place.’ I know though, that this constant harsh self-criticism has been around for as long as I can remember. It’s very awkward and heavy and useless, I want to drop it, but I’ve held it so long it feels practically embedded in my skin. I would like to be arrogant for a change, I think the world would be infinitely better if kids were raised to think they were capable of absolutely anything. Guilt is useless. I wish that knowing that made it go away.

Response:

I know. Sometimes it seems like an insane idea. That is how damaged we are. It makes me really angry when I realize how frightening it is to trust…anyone. Yes, that is the part that I think is so damaging. Too much of my life has been judged by others and I think I learned how to judge every breath, almost, very young. I think the judgement part is as destructive as almost any of it, cause it makes us sort of frozen when we aren’t busy judging ourselves harshly. It is sort of the opposite of choice, maybe. Hard to feel free to make choices when you are sure that what you are and do is always wrong. Yes! This has been so much my problem lately, feeling so certain that everything I am and everything I have done or could do is has been and will be Wrong. Paralyzing. But if we’re so good at being wrong at things, maybe we’re wrong about being wrong .

LOL. Yes, this is one that we get tripped up on a lot. Our t’pist gets this very funny, slightly teasing, slightly worried (about our reaction) look on his face when we are being wrong about being wrong. He is the first person in our life to make it ok to be wrong. No penalties, lotsa l*ve and a good dose of humor. My acting coach used to constantly urge against self- consciousness. ‘You can’t perform and judge your performance at the same time, so drop the judgement! It’s not your job to judge yourself, other people will do more than enough of that for you. Just let yourself Be there and the rest will fall into place.’ I know though, that this constant harsh self-criticism has been around for as long as I can remember. It’s very awkward and heavy and useless, I want to drop it, but I’ve held it so long it feels practically embedded in my skin. I would like to be arrogant for a change,

Not arrogant maybe. I know ppl who are arrogant and they are not so nice. Maybe strong and confident would be more than enough? But I do know the feeling of wishing I had the power to retaliate sometimes. Then, when the anger and hurt have subsided, I am glad that I don’t have all the power I wished for cause I think I would misuse it. I think the world would be infinitely better if kids were raised to think they were capable of absolutely anything. Guilt is useless. I wish that knowing that made it go away.

YES. I agree. I think lots of ppl get limited by the adults around them before they ever have any chance to recognize that the adults are full of it. And I wish that knowing all the stupid useless stuff I have been taught would go away, but I think at this point it is more a case of learning new ways to replace the old and useless stuff. Sort of an upgrade, like from Life 2.0 to Life 9.9. New version, more user friendly. b.

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Thank you MC. And yer welcome. *G* and waves. b. CS ppls, Thank you for this and pls have it added to the FAQ postings *smile* Masters Chorus — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

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I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a human. And humans are complex. Madly wonderfully dizzyingly complex. And how you heal will be, if you are lucky to have a therapist who cares and teaches and listens and learns, your own path, your own life. You are human first. You are dissociative second. I don’t mean to devalue the search for understanding your dissociation. I don’t mean to demean the doctors and researchers who try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. And I am not trying to rob you of your right to get caught up in the same pitfalls I have been through. But I thought it might help to know that others have been down this particular road as well, and that the knowledge of where some of the bumps in the road are will keep you from getting as many scraped knees and shorten some of the wrong turnings so that you can focus on what is really important. You. — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

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thank you coneys, i remember liking you from before. good points you made. i don’t fit into anyone’s perfect picture, nor should i. the end, remember what is important, You reminds me of a Walt Whitman poem, spoilering to quote it " To You WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true Soul and Body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs–out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago. I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you–you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect–I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you–I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are–you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows–these interminable rivers–you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution–you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles–you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way. ~Whitman, Walt

Response:

I am new on this group and came across your post somewhat accidentally. I just want to say that I think what you wrote was very truthful and inspiring. Quite coincidentally, I have been struggling with my diagnosis for the past 8 months. What you mentioned about seeing yourself in every textbook rings very true to me. It is very easy to get carried away with definition and labels which may provide some validation but which also result in confusion and rigidness. I whole-heartedly agree with you that we are all as different and complex as we are the same. I think that all of the disorders blend and overlap – from manic depression to dissociation to schizophrenia. I find myself frequenting all the newgroups; and find them equally as informative for my particular case. In the end I find, as you have mentioned, the answer lies in healing whatever wounds there are. I feel that all disorders are maladaptive or adaptive (which ever way you want to look at it) ways of dealing with pain. And the pain always has to do with love – not receiving love at crucial time in life and not being able to give it. Too often IMO, pdocs see the illness and not the person behind the manifestaions. I think this leads to repeating the cycle of self-defeating behavior. It is as if they are saying you are the illness. I know there are pdocs and therapists who really care about you the person and the unique story you bring and see the outward symptoms as just that symptoms. I think that diagnosies can be dangerous in that they can lead one to think of themselves as the diagnosis just as docs could see a person a set of symptoms. I think of how my life changed since I was labeled a certain diagnosis. I was told that I was a manic-depressive. I didn’t think I was but psychiatrists kept telling me that I was. I go to a support group for mood disorders and find that I may relate to a few people strongly but to most I don’t. I have alot of people telling me how the illness will progress and what the treatment will be like who don’t even know me. It is as though you are already pigeon-holed and expected to behave a certain way. Bipolar illness seems to be the most diagnosed of the mental illnesses and I have heard tha itt is because docs have the least amount of trouble treating it. They have more experience with it and a set procedure of medicating it. I really don’t understand how a pdoc can come to a determination of what you are suffering from from a 50 minute session. And does it matter all that much? If you are suffering from dissociation shouldn’t that be addressed regardless of whether one thinks you have dissociative disorder or manic-depression. I know that is a little off the topic but I do believe that all these illness stem from the same roots. I’d like to hear your thoughts. Thank you for a most thoughtful post. (sorry for the length) – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot

Response:

i wish everybody coudl read this and all the drs would look at it everyday. would it be ok if i sent it to some of my friends? i wont if you dont want me to – but soemtimes i worry if im not jsut like what they might read they wont believe in me and i think it would help some of my friends cuz soembody tells em theyre not real sometimes coyote "Twinkle, twinkle little star, How I wonder where you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky." ~Ann & Jane Taylor~

Response:

cs, What a "definitive" and marvelous post! – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – respectful snip… I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect.

<nodding I wonder how many of us have gone this route, how few clinicians know this?… going below with you – – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue.

Me, too. I agree. And I think, too that the need we experience for a "goodness of fit" with other dissociatives reflects a desperate need to belong, to ~not~ be the odd one out here, too, and to feel if this is an "illness" that it is "treatable", or a special "gift" that it is usable for one’s good, one’s well-being and self-respect, and perhaps, above all, if we "match" the profile we will know that we’re neither alone nor cr*zy. I remember the first time I was h*sp*talized in a specialized unit for t*auma disorders: at first it was such a relief, almost a high to have found others. Then the troubles began: all my test results were atypical, everybody’s story was different, etc. Of course, we were different ppl, but in a way which still makes me teary-eyed, I didn’t fit here either….for goodness sake, I couldn’t even be a "normal" dissociative!! There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve.

As someone with low pts. on this scale, I wonder who assumes this?! I will say that when I was in h*spi*al, the ppl who dissociated more were given more attention by the staff, giving those who got less attention the impression they were less "deserving". This situation can be addressed without this reaction, tho, and I think it should be. snip Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.)

Yup, another way to say we’re undeserving. seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well.

Thank you cs, it is from that place that the phoenix rises from the ashes. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right!

Yes! When I was diagnosed with DID, I told the T that Kluft doesn’t think there is DID without amnesia (between alters). – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -ourney I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a human. And humans are complex. Madly wonderfully dizzyingly complex. And how you heal will be, if you are lucky to have a therapist who cares and teaches and listens and learns, your own path, your own life. You are human first. You are dissociative second. I don’t mean to devalue the search for understanding your dissociation. I don’t mean to demean the doctors and researchers who try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. And I am not trying to rob you of your right to get caught up in the same pitfalls I have been through. But I thought it might help to know that others have been down this particular road as well, and that the knowledge of where some of the bumps in the road are will keep you from getting as many scraped knees and shorten some of the wrong turnings so that you can focus on what is really important. You.

thanks again to You, cs. "Doesn’t life lead us from one beyond tothe other, beyond ourselves, beyond our certainties, beyond our judgments, our egoism, beyond the world of appearances? Doesn’t it invite us to a constant

Response:

Thank you, coney silence for such an articulate, well rounded and thoughtful post. Mucho appreciated! Sierra of TN – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a human. And humans are complex. Madly wonderfully dizzyingly complex. And how you heal will be, if you are lucky to have a therapist who cares and teaches and listens and learns, your own path, your own life. You are human first. You are dissociative second. I don’t mean to devalue the search for understanding your dissociation. I don’t mean to demean the doctors and researchers who try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. And I am not trying to rob you of your right to get caught up in the same pitfalls I have been through. But I thought it might help to know that others have been down this particular road as well, and that the knowledge of where some of the bumps in the road are will keep you from getting as many scraped knees and shorten some of the wrong turnings so that you can focus on what is really important. You.

Response:

Hiya and welcome to asd. Glad you found us, glad you are here. I am new on this group and came across your post somewhat accidentally. I just want to say that I think what you wrote was very truthful and inspiring. Quite coincidentally, I have been struggling with my diagnosis for the past 8 months.

Thanks for the compliment. And it seems that everyone struggles with their dx, whatever it is. Maybe struggling is a piece of being human. I don’t know. What you mentioned about seeing yourself in every textbook rings very true to me. It is very easy to get carried away with definition and labels which may provide some validation but which also result in confusion and rigidness. I whole-heartedly agree with you that we are all as different and complex as we are the same. I think that all of the disorders blend and overlap – from manic depression to dissociation to schizophrenia. I find myself frequenting all the newgroups; and find them equally as informative for my particular case.

Clearly the problems that the professionals have in pinning down a correct dx for so many ppl means that what you say here is probably quite true. I certainly think so. In fact, it may be a kind of folly to think that someone would only be one strictly defined case of whatever the dx is, even if it is correct. People are too complicated for that. In the end I find, as you have mentioned, the answer lies in healing whatever wounds there are. I feel that all disorders are maladaptive or adaptive (which ever way you want to look at it) ways of dealing with pain. And the pain always has to do with love – not receiving love at crucial time in life and not being able to give it.

Agreed, 100%. Completely. Too often IMO, pdocs see the illness and not the person behind the manifestaions. I think this leads to repeating the cycle of self-defeating behavior. It is as if they are saying you are the illness. I know there are pdocs and therapists who really care about you the person and the unique story you bring and see the outward symptoms as just that symptoms. I think that diagnosies can be dangerous in that they can lead one to think of themselves as the diagnosis just as docs could see a person a set of symptoms.

I think t’pists who insist on a dx, and from there on in react to all behavior as a signature of that dx, are people who really aren’t in the right profession. They should be fixing cars. I think of how my life changed since I was labeled a certain diagnosis. I was told that I was a manic-depressive. I didn’t think I was but psychiatrists kept telling me that I was. I go to a support group for mood disorders and find that I may relate to a few people strongly but to most I don’t. I have alot of people telling me how the illness will progress and what the treatment will be like who don’t even know me. It is as though you are already pigeon-holed and expected to behave a certain way. Bipolar illness seems to be the most diagnosed of the mental illnesses and I have heard tha itt is because docs have the least amount of trouble treating it. They have more experience with it and a set procedure of medicating it.

Yes, I have periods of time where I think I could be seen as bi-polar, sometimes when I fit borderline, sometimes major depression, other stuff as well. I think that there are clearly some folks who are very classically bi-polar, for example, and the treatment of it with chemicals is clearly called for. But even those folks will tell you that they also need talk therapy in conjunction with the meds. And even those folks who are more definitively a single dx, will experience things that I associate with dissociation or some other dx. People are so much a combination of their past and present, their genetics and their environment, it seems ludicrous to me to try and shove anyone in a box. It is limiting and, ultimately means, imo, that you fail to see all of the potential they are. I really don’t understand how a pdoc can come to a determination of what you are suffering from from a 50 minute session. And does it matter all that much? If you are suffering from dissociation shouldn’t that be addressed regardless of whether one thinks you have dissociative disorder or manic-depression.

Yes and yes and yes. I know that is a little off the topic but I do believe that all these illness stem from the same roots. I’d like to hear your thoughts. Thank you for a most thoughtful post. (sorry for the length)

Your welcome. Your post was short compared to mine, and I like to read long posts. More to ponder, doncha know. Ok, here is what I think about causes. Please keep in mind that I am not book learned about most of this stuff except what I learned about dissociation, so what I am saying is based on bits and pieces of articles as well as people in my life, not any footnoted text. I think that there are many debilitating emotional illnesses out there. I think some have strong genetic connections. I don’t necessarily mean they were inherited so much as that they are encoded in someone’s genes and even if that person had extraordinary parents the illness would still have taken hold at some point. How strongly it would take hold, and how the person was helped and all that would have a strong connection to the parents and family involved, but the initial illness wouldn’t be provoked by parents. I include schizophrenia, alcoholism, bi-polar disorder among these. There are prolly others but I am not trying to make a complete list, just give examples based on my own experience. There is also a great deal of evidence that brain chemistry can change over time if a person (or for that matter an animal) is provoked repeatedly to respond with fear. So, I think that there is a chemical component in a lot of emotional illnesses that may have come to be over time, not a part of the person’s original genetic picture. Finally, I think there are emotional illnesses that are caused by the illness of people around a child. And in that regard, I think that a quite huge number of people would qualify as emotionally ill. In fact, I really think that most people are emotionally ill to some degree. (caveat: I am talking about eurocentric, western societies here, as that is my life experience) Ok, all that said, I think that most emotional illness that does not have a clear genetic cause is caused by a lack of love in childhood. That is the simplest way to put it, but I believe that it is a great deal more complex in reality than those few words. I think children can be neglected into emotional illness. I think they can be brutalized into it. I think they can be terrified into it. And I don’t think that the lack of love needs to be extreme to create hurt and damaged people. I think the most important aspect is that the damage is repetitious, continual. And I believe that it also must have a component of ignorance on the part of the adult. I don’t offer this as an excuse for monstrous behavior, but only that the combination of a lack of loving with an absence of comprehension of this lack, are a most terrible combination. I think that a parent who can recognize and talk about when they have failed makes it possible for healing to happen sooner and better for a child who has been wounded. I currently work part time at a craft shop. The clientele is mostly, tho not exclusively, wealthy and upper class. It has been an interesting experience, not the least because I am a long time left wing proletariat type, a sort of apathetic anarchist. I don’t normally have a great deal of sympathy for the rich. But what I am seeing, and reacting to with greater compassion over time, is that prolly 95% of the people who come into the shop are either in clear emotional distress, or acting out some obvious childhood traumas within the context of shopping. There are couples who come in, teeth clenched, bodies in this bizarre contortion that is sposed to simulate relaxed posture, and they spend the entire time sparring with one another in passive aggressive dances that make my skin crawl. I see people who cannot open their mouths without a whine coming out. They are smiling and yet every statement or question is querulous and whiny. They are demanding, beyond what is reasonable, even in an upscale shop. There are people who can’t stop talking, whose bodies are nearly vibrating with tension. And people who barely whisper and can’t look at my face. (and my face is pretty ok) I see people who are so lonely that they come and wander around every couple of days, for an hour or more, rarely buy anything, and yet ask my opinion on jewelry, pottery, anything for conversation. People who laugh after every statement. Nervous, throwaway laughter. A verbal tic. These are just a few of the symptoms I see. And I do consider them symptoms. I think very few of these people are actually happy in their lives. And these are people who have the privilege of monied families, good educations, successful professions, nice homes and an abundance of all the basics plus all the extras. Sometimes it feels like a parade of children in these large bodies, still trying to get someone to give them whatever it was they didn’t get 40 years ago. And I consider them to be emotionally ill. I see their children come in with them sometimes, and I see the illness that is being passed on to their children. And I have become more and more convinced that what they did not get was attentive love. I mean love that pays attention. Love that is not always perfect, but love that was aware enough and humble enough and generous enough to tell a child that it was flawed, but true. Love that could listen and hear. Love that could direct and learn. Love that was reliable even when it came with mistakes. And I think that there is precious … read more »

Response:

Thank you dreamspacer. This is a wonderful poem. I have never read any Whitman, tho I love poetry. This will prompt me to rectify the situation. As to fitting into a picture, I think we only need to fit into our own, yeah? b. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – thank you coneys, i remember liking you from before. good points you made. i don’t fit into anyone’s perfect picture, nor should i. the end, remember what is important, You reminds me of a Walt Whitman poem, spoilering to quote it " To You WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true Soul and Body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs–out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago. I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you–you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect–I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you–I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are–you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows–these interminable rivers–you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution–you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles–you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way. ~Whitman, Walt

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Response:

Thank you, coney silence for such an articulate, well rounded and thoughtful post. Mucho appreciated! Sierra of TN

Yer welcome Sierra. I have been reading of your saga with the horsepital and all. Lots of thoughts about it, tho mainly that you were very strong and smart, and I am glad you made it thru that. I hope you are doing better. I am still trying to catch up on all the posts at asd. Take care girl. b. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a human. And humans are complex. Madly wonderfully dizzyingly complex. And how you heal will be, if you are lucky to have a therapist who cares and teaches and listens and learns, your own path, your own life. You are human first. You are dissociative second. I don’t mean to devalue the search for understanding your dissociation. I don’t mean to demean the doctors and researchers who try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. And I am not trying to rob you of your right to get caught up in the same pitfalls I have been through. But I thought it might help to know that others have been down this particular road as well, and that the knowledge of where some of the bumps in the road are will keep you from getting as many scraped knees and shorten some of the wrong turnings so that you can focus on what is really important. You.

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Response:

cs, What a "definitive" and marvelous post!

Thanks. (gee, I like all these compliments, is that bad?) – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – respectful snip… I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. <nodding I wonder how many of us have gone this route, how few clinicians know this?…

I think lots. Most? – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – going below with you – spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. Me, too. I agree. And I think, too that the need we experience for a "goodness of fit" with other dissociatives reflects a desperate need to belong, to ~not~ be the odd one out here, too, and to feel if this is an "illness" that it is "treatable", or a special "gift" that it is usable for one’s good, one’s well-being and self-respect, and perhaps, above all, if we "match" the profile we will know that we’re neither alone nor cr*zy.

Absolutely. I think the need to belong is also about not wanting to be alone and frightened. So much connected to belonging, I think. I remember the first time I was h*sp*talized in a specialized unit for t*auma disorders: at first it was such a relief, almost a high to have found others. Then the troubles began: all my test results were atypical, everybody’s story was different, etc. Of course, we were different ppl, but in a way which still makes me teary-eyed, I didn’t fit here either….for goodness sake, I couldn’t even be a "normal" dissociative!!

Oh yeah. I saw this a lot, and decided I didn’t want to know the results of the tests they gave me. I had enough confusion. One of the few times I made a safety conscious decision. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. As someone with low pts. on this scale, I wonder who assumes this?! I will say that when I was in h*spi*al, the ppl who dissociated more were given more attention by the staff, giving those who got less attention the impression they were less "deserving". This situation can be addressed without this reaction, tho, and I think it should be.

I think professionals do this, but I also see it in rl groups of survivors. A terrible kind of self denigrating thing as if there were some way to tally up pain. It is sad that we do this to ourselves. And does us no good in any way. Just more pain. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – snip Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) Yup, another way to say we’re undeserving. seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Thank you cs, it is from that place that the phoenix rises from the ashes.

Yes, I think so too. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Yes! When I was diagnosed with DID, I told the T that Kluft doesn’t think there is DID without amnesia (between alters). ourney I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a human. And humans are complex.

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Coney Silence, Thank you for your post. It was well written and meaningful. It is appreciated. A couple of years ago I was lurking on asd. Now I’m interacting best I can. Don’t really know what I want/need from being in contact with others that have/are experiencing DID/MPD. Have been considering leaving. Perhaps this just was a way of stepping back to those times to understand what happened, where I’m going now. Thanks again for your post. Jan

Thank you. I am glad it touched you. I know that a lot of folks lurk at asd. Sometimes they come out and talk, then go back to watching again, sometimes take a break from it completely. I think that no one should feel they ~have~ to ~do~ anything at asd. Asd is here. There are always people here. Maybe as many hiding and learning as there are posting. I think what you do is what you need to do and that you shouldn’t feel you must be a specific way for asd. If you are contributing more because it reflects a desire to change in rl and this is a safe way and a safe place to work on it, then that is good. I don’t know. I hope that no matter what you decide, it is a decision that helps you heal. b. — For more information about this service, send e-mail to:

Response:

Hi coyote. Yes you can send it to anyone you like. I would be glad if it helps someone not feel so alone or strange. Is dumb for people to tell anyone they aren’t real, or that how they believe themselves to be isn’t real. Prolly one of the most healing things for us has been our t’pist, who absolutely recognizes and accepts each of us as full people, not just fragments or make believe. I mostly don’t care what anyone else believes about us cause we are learning and knowing more and more how to be safe with ourselves. Also, even if your friends aren’t dissociative or multiple, they are prolly not just like what everyone thinks they are. I think that a lot of the time people get stuck into pictures of themselves that maybe they would like to not be. Or would like to be more than. So, maybe remind them that no one is exactly anything, except themselves. b. i wish everybody coudl read this and all the drs would look at it everyday. would it be ok if i sent it to some of my friends? i wont if you dont want me to – but soemtimes i worry if im not jsut like what they might read they wont believe in me and i think it would help some of my friends cuz soembody tells em theyre not real sometimes coyote "Twinkle, twinkle little star, How I wonder where you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky." ~Ann & Jane Taylor~

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Response:

I am glad it was meaningful for ya. Sometimes the storm of stuff in my head is just a jumble and overwhelming, and sometimes it makes sense. whew. b. Coney Silence, Love your post, It is great that we are not the same even though we share some common ground. Thank you Little Unicorn

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Response:

Coney Silence, Love your post, It is great that we are not the same even though we share some common ground. Thank you Little Unicorn

Response:

Thank you, coney silence for such an articulate, well rounded and thoughtful post. Mucho appreciated! Sierra of TN Yer welcome Sierra.

It was done arete’ (with excellence!) I have been reading of your saga with the horsepital and all.

Sad isn’t it? : o( Lots of thoughts about it, tho mainly that you were very strong and smart, and I am glad you made it thru that.

Thanks, cs. I so appreciate all the support being given to me and everyone here. I hope you are doing better.

Doing better overall. Today was the one week anniv*rsary. Hard day. I am still trying to catch up on all the posts at asd.

I can see that. Welcome back! Take care girl.

Will do! If I haven’t told you already, b… I _really_ like the way you think! Sierra of TN

Response:

Dear Coney silence, Your insight and perspective blew me away. Thank you for sharing this at asd. This needed to be said and i needed to take it in. ) Wishing you a gentle evening/day SierrDevn – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I have been away for what seems like forever, tho I think it is only a few months, at most. I am struggling (criminy, it seems like all of us are always struggling, sigh) with being somewhere in between…fear and health, separation and connection, watching and living. I remember back to the days when I first sorta discovered my dx and how confusing it all was. How, on the one hand I wanted to read every book and article and see every movie and documentary and learn as much as I could. And, on the other hand, I would find myself in these sources and then find things that held no picture of me at all. I was, even as I began to feel like I made sense to myself for the first time in my life, comparing myself to every theoretical treatise, every anecdotal piece, every autobiography, every statement ever made about dissociation and multiplicity. There was terrible battle of feeling like I had finally been found being bumped up against not fitting the exact picture, the perfect clinical suspect. spoilered from here for possibly upsetting images. splats used. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When I was h*spitalized, I found more of the same with the dissociatives and multiples I was with. Same in support groups for survivors. We all seemed to have a life long need to understand and be understood combined with a terrible need to be perfect. People were constantly rating themselves on some undefined dissociative scale. And when I found asd, we found it again. I think part of it is a maybe a normal human need to understand oneself and others and the focus here is dissociation. But I have seen a lot of pain around this issue. There seem to be some different focal points, imo. One seems to be a kind of assumption that the more dissociative you are the more brownie points you deserve. Ok, that’s putting it very baldly and not entirely fairly, but I have seen it. Often, tho, it is something folks who are less dissociative seem to do to humble themselves, or dismiss their own pain. (we are so funny sometimes, doncha think, that we don’t hold it over someone else’s head that they are less dissociative, we hold it over our own head that somehow maybe we didn’t suffer as much…sigh, we seem to be almost constitutionally unable to have compassion for ourselves.) It seems to be another way that we can dismiss our our pain, beat ourselves up emotionally, and forget that there isn’t currently a scale created that can measure the damage of abuse or weigh the hurt and sorrow we live with. I don’t think it is measurable. When does the damage become too much? After one r*pe? Two? One broken leg? Or do we trade abandonment and emotional torment for physical abuse and alcoh*lism? There is no balance sheet on horror. Perhaps what we all have in common, the place that each of us can touch and share without doubt, is that we were not loved well. Another piece of this is that the scholarship taken to be the first and last word doesn’t even agree with itself entirely. And it is always being revised and refined as dissociation and healing are better diagnosed and treated. I think that for some of us to find that there are healers who are trying to understand us, after a lifetime of no one understanding us, even ourselves, that the need to be the perfect image of the textbook dissociative is overwhelming. And when we find out that we may not fit the textbook, confusion and pain often threaten to overwhelm. I remember reading either Kluft or Ross when I was newly dx’d. As I read I found myself saying yes…yes… yes, I do that, yes, that happens….no, that’s not me and neither is that. When I hit the parts that didn’t fit, I thought I was a "wrong" person somehow. That I couldn’t even be my dx right! Since the beginnings of this journey I have met people who vary so widely in their dissociation that I have come to think of the books and the supposed facts they contain as guidelines, signposts perhaps. I have met dissociatives who seemed to be quite calm and capable and appeared to be minimally dissociative, and yet, when they would explain the insiders, and how everything worked, I was amazed that they could string two words together without a ten minute time delay to get thru the maze of protectors and safeguards and hurt children. And I have met dissociatives who would tell me they were "only" ddnos, who couldn’t hold onto a thought much beyond five or six sentences before they would space out and lose the continuity of their thinking. And I have seen combinations of this, and experienced my own periods of clarity and confusion enough to know that it would take a separate book on each of us to fully describe the full spectrum of our experience and behavior. I will always remember the children of a man I once worked with. My office was having its annual get together, lots of food, everyone’s family, associates of the office, the whole deal. These two young boys (maybe six and eight years old) were listening to the band playing music. These brothers, children of smart, caring, attentive parents were an amazement to me. The older child stood to one side, watching very carefully and clearly absorbing every detail of the musicians movements, the music, the instruments. He was enthralled, but very serious and clearly content to see and hear at a distance. His brother was all over the place. Dancing like a wild man, whooping it up, getting right up in front of the musicians to see and hear and vibrate along with them like some human musical note. I turned to their father and laughed about the extreme difference in behavior and he responded, with a touch of ruefulness, that the eldest child had always been very calm, thoughtful, and peaceful.. That it was because he was such an easy child from day one that the parents decided they could easily handle having two children. But son number two wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he had always been active and exuberant with the experiences of life and required enormous amounts of direction from his parents to keep from flying right off the planet. My point is that each of us is different. We are not comparative quantities of a diagnosis. We are human beings who have been hurt and survived it with the use of our imagination and our desire and our strength. And how we were hurt, and by whom, as well as where we grew up, and what our families were like, if we had siblings or were alone, were we from wealthy families or poor, our whole history weaves in and out of how we learned to be safe. A thousand details of life are the markers of who we are. And the silent details of our genetic determination, choices no one made about who we are, they become part of the story each of us is. Light hair or brown skin, brown eyes or blue. Are we born observers or wild participants? Are we tall or short? And how those details played into the dynamic of what happened in our lives. These cannot be winnowed out for some blueprint that will define and identify each of us exactly. Thank goodness. I guess what I am trying to say is that who you are now and how you came to be reading this at asd is so individual, so personal, so unique, that I hope you can hold onto the truth of yourself. You are not going to be just like some biographer, or case study, or even the other dissociative client your therapist has. And that is good. That is ok. That is because you are not a book or a theory. You are a human. And humans are complex. Madly wonderfully dizzyingly complex. And how you heal will be, if you are lucky to have a therapist who cares and teaches and listens and learns, your own path, your own life. You are human first. You are dissociative second. I don’t mean to devalue the search for understanding your dissociation. I don’t mean to demean the doctors and researchers who try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. And I am not trying to rob you of your right to get caught up in the same pitfalls I have been through. But I thought it might help to know that others have been down this particular road as well, and that the knowledge of where some of the bumps in the road are will keep you from getting as many scraped knees and shorten some of the wrong turnings so that you can focus on what is really important. You.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * "no one has the power to own another human" Lionheart

Response:

ohh thank you!!! i wish we could find a t liek that – our first one didnt want to deal with any of us just sara. soemtimes i dont mind what other peopel think about us and sometimes it does bother me Also, even if your friends aren’t dissociative or multiple, they are prolly not just like what everyone thinks they are. I think that a lot of the time people get stuck into pictures of themselves that maybe they would like to not be. Or would like to be more than. So, maybe remind them that no one is exactly anything, except themselves.

some of my friends are like us and some arent and sometimes its hard to try to explain things and you said it reallly good. do you mind if i add part of your last sentence to one of my quote files? please? coyote "Forget that I remember And dream that I forget." ~Algernon Charles Swinburne~

Response:

The more we heal the less we are affected by the judgment of others. Especially learning how to discern which others are ones to respect and which others are ones to let pass.

i mess up a lot when it comes to people. i knwo i shouldnt do it – but i want to trust everybdy. im not very good at knowin which ones to trust or not You have my permission to quote anything I say at any time in any way that you’d like. That way you don’t have to feel the need to ask each time. Of course the risk here is finding out that I am completely contradicting myself later on.

ohhh thank you!!! ive got seven or eight files of quotes and i only keep the ones i reallllllly like and mean soemthin to me I like reading the quotes you add on. In fact, I have always liked when ppl put quotes at the bottom of their posts. I used to get those quote calendars and really liked them. I should look for one for this year. I need a calendar anyway. Ok, so, byeee.

im glad you like the quotes i liek those calendars too! everytime somebdy gets one i wnat to see it and look at the quotes coyote "Stars are too far away." ~Michael Brafter~

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hi coyote. Yes you can send it to anyone you like. I would be glad if it helps someone not feel so alone or strange. Is dumb for people to tell anyone they aren’t real, or that how they believe themselves to be isn’t real. Prolly one of the most healing things for us has been our t’pist, who absolutely recognizes and accepts each of us as full people, not just fragments or make believe. I mostly don’t care what anyone else believes about us cause we are learning and knowing more and more how to be safe with ourselves. ohh thank you!!! i wish we could find a t liek that – our first one didnt want to deal with any of us just sara. soemtimes i dont mind what other peopel think about us and sometimes it does bother me

We have been really lucky about our t. Searched for a lot of years, trying and giving up. Feel like he is a gift we have been given. The more we heal the less we are affected by the judgment of others. Especially learning how to discern which others are ones to respect and which others are ones to let pass. Also, even if your friends aren’t dissociative or multiple, they are prolly not just like what everyone thinks they are. I think that a lot of the time people get stuck into pictures of themselves that maybe they would like to not be. Or would like to be more than. So, maybe remind them that no one is exactly anything, except themselves. some of my friends are like us and some arent and sometimes its hard to try to explain things and you said it reallly good. do you mind if i add part of your last sentence to one of my quote files? please?

You have my permission to quote anything I say at any time in any way that you’d like. That way you don’t have to feel the need to ask each time. Of course the risk here is finding out that I am completely contradicting myself later on. I like reading the quotes you add on. In fact, I have always liked when ppl put quotes at the bottom of their posts. I used to get those quote calendars and really liked them. I should look for one for this year. I need a calendar anyway. Ok, so, byeee. b. coyote "Forget that I remember And dream that I forget." ~Algernon Charles Swinburne~

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hi coyote, liked the swinburne poem. cricket a girl not a bug.

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