Dear ReveuseTroublee and other friends in here,
I will try to express some of my experience, but ofc it is only my way of approaching dissociation, and everyone is different. It comes after four and a half years of my active engagement in healing, and at times it has been hell, and most of the days very just about survival, and not living. But I do not want it to sound grim, it is what it is, that is how I understood it, and I was like: “ok, I will focus on survival first”. The only thing I had to do for myself was to survive. While doing that, I gradually became the most important person for myself. I couldn’t understand it before, when people say: I care about myself first. I never did, there was always someone more important. But when all this hit me, I could not afford any more to have anyone else more important for me than me. I don’t want it to sound awful, but I actually believe it is part of the healing, and un-learning the conditioning that says: you are not worthy, you are below every other living being. Hell, no. I stood up for myself, all of myself.
When I say four and a half year of active healing, it means for as long as I have been aware of dissociation as a problem. I had it before, I had it always – well, at least from the age of three – but I somehow developed ways to live with it, and I developed ingenious ways of camouflaging and hiding it. I think that people mostly thought that I am eccentric, that I often change gears, from hyper-focus to absent-mindedness, and I had some features that seemed as extraordinary talents, such as to learn a language in a week, to “think out of the box”, but that was due to the way my perception worked. I also had massive amnesia, for a certain type of information – basically, for everything that my brain tried to protect me from, so when I would “see” such awful things in my mind, the whole system would activate to erase it, and bring me back to ground zero, and I would have my identity built from a scratch. Again, and again and again.
To the present moment.
I went through 6 months of EMDR now, after being two times for six months in CBT. EMDR helped with integrating traumatic memories. And just that. Just traumatic memories, so that they do not hijack me from the present moment, and throw me into flashbacks that were tormenting me. EMDR cleared the way for internal communication, because it removed the terrible pain that was preventing me to do so. But what I did in EMDR therapy, was to introduce the metaphor of parts on my own. I already knew about parts, but I was discouraged in my former therapy to talk about them. I was told they were just dissociated capsules of memory. They were not.
“They” are the way my thoughts are organized. It is, and I am absolutely certain of that, a specific arrangement of thinking patterns, ingeniously developed in order to protect the sense of self, and not the other way round. I do not see it is a breakage, I see it as the only way I could save my sane mind. And I refuse to pathologize this specific arrangement of thinking patterns, because if I were to pathologize it, I would see it as something bad. I see it as something that, once I understand it as a way that my mind works, I can use to heal not dissociation, but the wound, the trauma, that caused it in the first place. Dissociation, in my mind, and in the way I deal with it, interact with it and rely on it, is a particular organization of my mind that helps me heal the wounded self. And I did not invent it, Janina Fisher did😊
Fortunately, my EMDR therapist was very open-minded and professional all along. We talked yesterday, it was our penultimate meeting, as I feel I can go on, on my own, without the safety net, at least for the time being.
I came up with the metaphor of sewing through or stitching through my experiences, states and memories, while working with him.
What I am trying to express is how “communication” happens, at least for me. I first had two instances of communication, last spring, well, almost exactly a year ago. Before that, I could not really communicate, just observe. Last spring, I went out of a deep depersonalization/derealization that was anesthetizing me before I was able to deal with the pain. When I got out of DPDR, I was overwhelmed with feelings from primarily two parts. One was a desperate child hoping for attachment, and the other one was a sort of a monster, the pain materialized, that wanted me hurt, sending terrible images of self-hurt and hurt in general, just so that I do not look towards the real pain. I spent months, every day, from the sunset (a huge trigger) until later in the evening, negotiating for my life with the monster. I started talking with them, saying that I understand where they come from, and that it is ok. Parallel to this, I embraced the child, I said it was ok too, and I am here now for all of us. It is more complicated than that, as I had a helper too, the more emotional part of me, that managed to establish that connection with the child. So it was never just me, but I had to act as a manager.
When I started the EMDR therapy, the child craved for attachment, and wanted to attach to the therapist. I talked to the child, and I managed to divert the attachment towards myself. I knew I am strong enough and able enough to take care of us, even though it was very difficult.
It still happens, that I go through the day as “me” or “I”, and in the evening, there is a whole party of people, asking to be acknowledged and heard, and I have to deal with it before going to sleep.
I am preparing some lectures now, for my work, and as I didn’t do it for a while, well, practically since two or three years ago, it brought in some concerns. I am not just me any more, as my former professional persona could be understood as a calm, composed, very unemotional presentation of myself, or that is what I used to be. Now, I am more than that, and when I let my other, more emotional and lively parts inform my work, it produces some interesting and new thinking, and I feel I was upgraded by allowing other parts of me to take a more active role in my favourite activity of thinking and theorizing.
However, I have no idea how the lectures will go, as before I could rely on my professional persona to do it, to a perfection. Sometimes, I would find myself thinking about something else, while she was performing. Now I feel I will be present. I want to be present. And it is scary, as exposing sides of me that I did not dare introduce before. But it is me.
I think I want to say, everyone probably has to find ways of self-regulation that work best for them. It was devastating for my self-regulation when I was first denied my reality of fragmentation, as I felt almost violated as a person for not being allowed to express myself the way I feel I am. However, I was equally afraid of having my fragmentation confirmed. My current EMDR therapist therefore just expressed his opinion on my fragmentation, confirming it, but not labelling it with either DID or OSDD. I said I do not need to know, because I know how it is for me, and I finally understand how to work with it. I told him I don’t want it pathologized, and he has shown respect for me as a person and a client, as I think he saw that I am able to develop a system of my own healing, with his help, of course.
I also told him that it doesn’t mean that it is easy. I suffer every day, but it is getting better. But I have around 5 or 10 instances during the day, when I am triggered, then I need to understand where the trigger comes from, who among my states is triggered, where it comes from and why, and after I understand it, I need to “stitch” it, literally like imagining the act of sewing through, that memory of situation and my present sense of self.
However, the equally important part of this process is “unstitching” or “de-linking” from previous conditioning. Most of my triggers are related to unresolvable conflict within, that I used to have. How can someone supposed to take care of you hurt you? That is what child asks themselves. “There must be something wrong with me”. That is a child’s thinking, because in order to survive as a “self”, she has to believe that the world is not inherently bad. It is easier to think she is the bad one. She thinks she has to be punished then. But when I “unstitch” this conditioning, and I tell her: “No, there is nothing wrong with you, something has been done to you, sweety, but no one can hurt you any more, I am here for us all”, things get better. I can therefore find ways to self-regulate, by de-linking from those learned beliefs, that were just wrong.
Huh, I wrote a lot. Sorry about that. But then, even though I know that every person is different, I wish I knew this before, I wish I could read about someone else’s experience somewhere, just to be able to compare it, perhaps.
Take care, and I send a lot of love to everyone who reads this  
A.
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