My mentor wants me to have a sit-down with my landlady and my roommate over the drama going on. It makes perfect sense, except...well, I don't know if I can.

I'm in PTSD hell, and I just can't deal with anything else right now. It's too many triggers all at once--the bar thing last weekend and now this BS drama. And I have nowhere to turn, no way to process any of it.

I know that if we have a meeting, one of two things will happen. Possibility one: I will switch to a terrified child part who will just apologize and try to make nice or will freeze and shut down because she can't handle conflict--it'll all be about avoiding the abuse that comes with conflict. (I know, the two aren't always linked, but in this case, roommate has actually been verbally aggressive, even though it was indirect, so this fear is not invalid.) The other possibility is that I'll switch to the angry teenage part who will just want to verbally annihilate the roommate and is very well capable of it.


I know that, at this point, given my levels of stress, panic, and dissociation, I won't be able to stay me without switching. My mentor asked me today which part of me could deal with the situation, and the truth is there's nobody. We're triggered in different ways and by different aspects of the situation, but we're all triggered. That seems to be the way it usually works in my system--the boundaries between us are not rigid, so the responses to situations blur together too. What affects one of us almost always affects all of us.

It's times like these that I really need a therapist. I need someone who can help me sort out the triggers and get all of us more grounded in the present. I need to be able to integrate the child parts' desire to be nice and not hurt roommate with the teenage part's "I'm above this and you can't hurt me with your stupid drama" sense of self-assurance. I know they're parts of me, and I can see them and feel their feelings, but I can't integrate them into me, and I can't manage to stay present when I even hear or think about the roommate, so I know I won't be able to if we sit down face to face.

I know what I need to be able to do to manage this meeting, but I have no idea how to get there. It feels really hopeless and terrifying right now.