We Are Fragments

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This past week … wow, what can we say about this past week. 

There are so many things that have been going through our head since Monday, when we felt in danger of losing our job, and then on Wednesday when we met Marisa on Twitter, the very first person who has experienced DID/MPD (Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder – this link leads to WebMD) that we’ve ever met; she’s actually recovered. Though there are people in our life who question whether or not one can actually recover from DID/MPD, we know we don’t want to “recover”, we want to learn to control Us. People have done it.

It may only be April, and to most people 4 months is not that long of a time in the grand scheme of life. For us it seems like forever. Life two months ago might as well be 10 years ago; it was someone else’s’ life. What we are experiencing now feels like an uphill battle with a lifetime of baggage strapped to our back, and trying to appear "normal", maintain relationships, and function on a day-to-day basis just makes it more difficult.

We’ve been writing every day since the middle of January, finally achieving our goal of attempting to heal and understand us through writing/art therapy, and to look back at the progress in such a short time amazes us; but then to look towards the future, and what we have yet to achieve leaves us feeling dumbfounded, overwhelmed, confused; the closest to alone we have felt for the first time in our life.

We’ve come to the conclusion…I’ve come to the conclusion…that there is more to us than just Bitch and I**. We were going to wait to hear what Marisa had to say about this, because we had asked her in the post from Thursday, among other things, about how she came about separating her Alters*; and whether or not she thought I had been assimilating all the characteristics that we’re not me (the Host*), onto Bitch. Characteristics like:

Hyper-sexuality - not promiscuity, however, we know that was The Other Girl. We don’t know who this Alter/Fragment is. I have a feeling it’s the one responsible for making The Other Girl end relationships in the past due to the notion that she was “not getting enough sex”. Seriously. The Other Girl ended a few relationships for that very reason.
Extreme anger – uncontrollable and seething, almost blinding. And when coupled with Bitch makes causes panic and tears. We think this is the male influence we’ve discussed previously, that we thought was just a voice, but we don't feel we actually have schizophrenia, a failed diagnosis from 9 years ago; this makes more sense. This Alter/Fragment is mean and get’s angry at us and at everybody. When we are alone with him I yell at him. This is who wrote this post: http://just-call-me-frank.blogspot.com/2011/03/short-entries-4-when-anxiety-takes-over.html
Excessive childish behaviour – that’s Bitch, and it’s only excessive because we are 31. Skipping in public and playing with the toys in the toy department of Toys R’ Us or WalMart do not a mature 31 year old woman make, that’s just the tip of her fantasy play-land. Some people have enjoyed that part of The Other Girl and us, and some people in our life have thought it stupid, and did not understand it.

There are probably a few more, but these are the ones that are the most vibrant and out of control, these are The Alters*/Fragments/We, who vie for their chance to Front* at certain times of the week, day, hour – who are called upon when there is a trigger – something else we are trying to figure out so we can maintain some control again.

We know that the sexuality and anger can’t be Bitch because she is, essentially, a child. That’s how we came to realize there were more, because these strong Alters/Fragments are not part of who I am. It should be noted though that Bitch and I, more often than not, share co-consciousness*; she used to share it with The Other Girl constantly.

We’ve been trying to figure out who is getting upset about Marissa, because as I sit here and write we are thinking back to a few hours ago, and it happened again tonight when we got a link to another person we had met, who also started a DID blog. And while we lay in bed, sobbing, I yelled at whoever it was that was causing the sobbing.

“What the hell is your problem?! Why do you get upset when we meet people who are like us?!”

Of course there was not answer, not yet anyway; whoever it is too busy crying. They’ll probably tell us later.

Fabulous Person; who knows us, who has known us and has no doubt been aware of shifts that have happened in front of her; says that it is entirely possible. That it makes complete sense that there would be more than just Bitch and I. Other Fragments to deal with things.

“I know that these characteristics, the sex stuff, the anger, they are not me, and they are not Bitch…they have to be something else” I tell her. Then I begin to wonder who I am in the grand scheme of things, and get scared about our other Fragments.

.

“I think we need a doctor” I say to her, beginning to cry as I stand in the bathroom looking in the mirror at us.

While Fabulous Person is not trained in the field of psychiatry, we value her opinion and input when it comes to trying to figure shit out. She has personal experience both dealing with people who have mental disabilities, and has had her own trying events in her life, and has seen things that the average person has not witnessed. She has witnessed some pretty crazy stuff with us. She is a strong woman. She is our friend and our sounding board, and she does what she can to help us try to maneuver the maze of trying to heal and understand our self, so that we can have a life that is more stable; something it has never been.

We’ve moved so many times in our life, within cities, cross country - the kind of relocation we are used to is far from stable. We’ve always been running scared, afraid to be found out. In reality we probably would have benefited from opening up from the very beginning, when we finally go counselling at the age of 13 and 14.

Unfortunately the counselling was more damaging in some ways, and we learned to keep our self shut down.

“Dad says it’s our fault, because we never talked to the counselors about anything”, we say to Angry Brother on the phone recently. It's true, without being prompted we never shared anything, if we didn't have to.

“But don’t you remember”, he said, “she refused to see us anymore after awhile, she couldn’t handle us.”

Though I don’t have much memory of it; it was true. The Father, Angry Brother, Baby Brother and Us had been having family counselling, but none of us took to it well. Of course the counselling hadn’t been for abuse, it had been simply because our parents had gotten divorced and The Father thought that our behaviour problems, including Angry Brothers, were caused by that.

The Father was never aware of the we abuse had endured at the hands of The Mother until I started writing about it this year. Now that we talk with him about these things, he is not surprised. There are several indicators that he told us about, signs he should have seen, and even worse ones that we knew about that helped us understand that her head was as ill as ours. Maybe even more.

Thinking back to The Mothers issues, the stories she had shared with him, about how her parents had abused her in one way or another, he talked about how these kinds of things, trauma from abuse, when left untreated trickles down through generations and can become a cycle. He is learning a lot now, reading to understand us better.

 “This is why I can’t have kids, dad” we cried to him on the phone. “Because I see how we yell at the cats. And we would never lay a hand on them, but if I had children they would be damaged.”

We are okay with this. We don’t want kids anyway, for multiple reasons other than our mental health. The Other Girl really wanted children of her own. She had even been planning on getting pregnant with Significant Other, who we broke up with at the end of August last year (2010). They had been talking about having a baby by this time. Thank god we were all back to stop that, to stop her.

So, since Wednesday we’ve been thinking a lot about who “we” are. It may seem silly.

“Oh, well, it’s only been two and a half days, how much time could you really be thinking about it”, you ask?

All the damn time. That’s the thing with having your head full of more than just one. There is shit going on all the time. We hardly sleep, which means there are about 19 hours in the day that we have for thinking. At work we’re always thinking, discussing stuff – unless someone fights for control. The only time we have less activity is when we are with Fabulous People, The Jeans…or…FNA…(insert a tear here); and even then it’s not a given that we can focus.

I want anyone reading to understand that when I say “we” in writing, I am referring to whoever is helping me write, whoever is giving me the information I need, whoever is sharing headspace with me - usually Bitch. Just like in real life though, I try to censor our self because it makes people confused. We said in front on The Jeans today and he responded.

“Who is we?” then he paused, and said “Oh, right.” He looked uncomfortable.

Generally it’s Bitch sharing consciousness when we write not only because she is my favourite. (don’t tell the others), but because she has been around since there was first a “we” and I left her to keep an eye on things.

We’ve written about that too…somewhere around here, how she has been responsible for watching over The Other Girl and letting me know what was going on. There exists an entry about how she kicked me out the coma this last time around years after our terrible car accident.:

“We’ve had a few conversations with The Father (Our Father, not “THE Father”) regarding our beliefs. The most memorable, for obvious reasons, was about a year ago, after our grandfather passed away. It took place in a pickup truck, as many of our conversations have throughout life[...] Bitch kicked me harder than ever before. “Wake up. You will not believe this shit”, she said after a final swift kick. (That coma was hard to get out of) [Excerpt from out March 20, 2011 post, Religion, You Say? We Have a View On That]

And she was responsible for alerting me to The Other Girls stupid fucking husband, and all the mental abuse he was putting her through, and the mental and substance abuse she had been putting herself through trying to cope with what turned out to be misdiagnosed mental illnesses of a different sort (social anxiety, depression and manic-depression). Bitch is also the tattle-tale.

We understand if you don’t understand. We also understand if you wonder why we share this stuff. We just do, to help raise awareness, along with many others in the world; in addition we are trying to figure things out through writing therapy; we recommend it for any of your problems, assuming you have any. (everybody does, duh)

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We wanted to stay away from glossary words, but the more we started writing the more they made sense, at least to explain it to the outside world. We will gradually apply our own terms in writing, to better clarify things for our self as we begin to understand.

*Directly from the DID glossary of Marisa Feathers:

Alter:  My term of choice for others in the System. In the psychiatric community, an alter is defined as an alternate personality, personality state, ego state or identity with its own unique perspectives, abilities, memories or other traits that differ from the Host or Executive personality.”

Co-consciousness: When two or more parts of a system share awareness of the inner and outer world and sometimes control. They are not always aware of it (as in the case of some of the first posted writing). Some prefer to call it Co-presence. Co-consciousness can be a valuable tool for learning to work together, however more and more multiples believe it is not a necessary part of recovery.

Being Out: The experience of being in control of the body, interacting with those outside the system or the world in general. Also known as Fronting.

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**Who is me. I am Frank. I make all the Alters/Fragments/We use my name for the purpose of this blog and in Twitter - just to make things less confusing. In real life we are forced to use The Other Girls’ name, as she used to be the host for them, but as we have discussed many times through our writing of the last couple months, we killed her; and I took over as host. We have discussed with The Mother the desire to change our name legally. We don’t want her name.

We are going to write about her one day, The Other Girl, what she was like, some of the things Bitch remembers about her. There is so much for us to write though. And we don’t want it all to be about DID. We have a bit of a life and many other interests that we like to write about, outside of the subject of DID.