Quote:
Originally Posted by peaches100
My parents are in town for a visit, and I'm having an awful time trying to cope with the way different parts of me view my childhood and relationship with my mom and dad! My mind keeps going back and forth from one viewpoint to the other. Each viewpoint feels right at the time that part of me is active. No matter which side I take, the others feel like they are being invalidated and told that their experiences and memory of what happened in the past are wrong!
I've had a lot of very upsetting, traumatizing situations that have arisen in my family (mostly as a child, but sometimes also as an adult). I've been in therapy a long time trying to understand it, accept it, and cope with it. But along with the parts of me that hold intense feelings of rejection, sadness, shame, and anger, I have other parts of me that repeatedly tell me what happened wasn't that bad...that I've just made a big deal out of it. This has made it super hard to accept that the things that happened to me weren't my fault and/or aren't just my tendency to overreact and takes things too personally.
Whenever my parents come into town and I see them, a part of me takes over that thinks my mom and dad haven't mistreated me takes over. Then I feel very guilty for having the kind of pain and anger I do toward them (even though I never show it and always treat them well when we're together). I start believing that the parts of me who feel deep pain over things that have happened in the family must be remembering things wrong. I start doubting and discounting the bad memories; otherwise, I can't deal with the guilty feelings. If the visit with my parents goes well, the conflicting feelings are even worse! One part says, "How can you be so unkind toward your mom and dad? Look! They aren't doing anything to hurt you!"
What ends up happening is that I go to bed feeling like the day I spent with my mom and dad went well, and I think I feel fine. But that night, I usually have horrible nightmares. Usually, they are the repetitive kind I get that center on being lost, separated from, or abandoned by my family and not being able to find my way home...and also other very bad dreams where I am in danger. I wake up feeling depressed, and it is like I can feel those other parts of me that hold the pain, the ones that are hurt, the ones that I'm trying to heal in therapy, and it feels like they are crying because nobody believes them.
I feel like I am being torn apart and don't know who to believe.
Please help!!
Peaches
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you seem to know a lot about whats going on with your alters... heres a question.... how does your system handle other conflicts...its not like this is the first time alters have disagreed about things in general or more important issues right.....
example one time in therapy I was having problems with one alter believing something had happened and another alter felt it happened a different way and yet another alter was yelling in my head it never happened in any way.
my therapist asked each a question..... no two alters are the same so how does the system usually handle when there is a disagreement. she also pointed out we had been DID whether we knew the technical term or not since before we were 5 years old. so in all those 20 some odd years of sharing a body you cant tell me (the therapist) that this is the one and only time any of you all have disagreed.
of course it wasnt the first and only time any of my alters disagreed with each other. they all had their own way of being, their own sense of agency so of course like normal children and teens there was going to be occasional upsets, occasional disagreements, and down right fighting. so how did the system for all that time from the first alter creation to my biological adulthood handle things like this....
turned out there was an alter inside who's sense of agency was to deal with conflicting situations. having to perform during intimacy with adults when being a child, and knowing it was wrong/ didnt feel right, being blamed for doing things that others did, one wanting to play on the play ground and another wanting to jump rope and another wanting to color.....the list of internal conflicts were many with my alters....
so thats how my system since very early childhood handled conflicts of any kind, the alter who's sense of agency was to do this, did their sense of agency of settling conflicts.
my point is since you are DID and this probably isnt the first time your alters have had conflicts of beliefs and feelings and you are able to know and communicate with your alters maybe you can ask inside and find out which alter has been handling this conflict all your life. then ask inside for their help in keeping things calm while the parents are visiting. (Im also assuming here this is not the first time that you have had to spend time with your parents since your alters were created during very early childhood, so someone inside must know how to handle this situation of being around your abusers)