Slow Burn In The Switch: Part II

Some of us felt the need to write about our better switches.

Sometimes a transition, which is also called a switch* in Dissociative Identity Disorder isn't always burning anger, or much discomfort. For some of us it's an ebb and flow, like a river. That's usually when those involved actually like each other. When "we" wrote last time about switching I am not sure we made it clear that the severe discomfort was because of who was sharing space/struggling for control with each other. It's not always the same for all of us. We don't always make sense. sigh

Most of the time switches are because of triggers*, from what we understand; smells, sounds, the way something is said, things we encounter, people, almost anything can be a trigger...not all of us are aware of each others triggers yet...we're still getting used to everyone having free reign - without our core* (The Other Girl) it's much harder from some us to keep under control, she was always so good at it, control. Everyone wants to have a chance to play now, when they can...and others not so much, sometimes. Most of the times switches happen suddenly for us, sometimes there is a struggle for control...either way, they are hardly ever noticeable unless they manifest into a a sudden shift from someone who is nice and happy, into someone who is generally hateful. Or if we are struggling with it. Otherwise most of us have so many similarities that it's almost undetectable to the average person who wouldn't be able to pick up on voice changes, demeanor changes, sometimes facial changes.

I won't do a roll call for everyone that has been around, but myself, and Catherine are the out the most these days, with massive influence from Sam (he's our male alter), and occasional flits of the others. Frank comes out here and there, but she has never been the alter functioned past sort of "saving" us. Sometimes we feel bad that James is largely hanging out with teenage girls, but we're pretty grown up...

There are 10 of us, a possible 11th that we've known about for a couple of weeks, but we are apprehensive to confront, acknowledge she's older though, older than me and Catherine...younger than Frank - we don't want to have more. We stopped working on mapping right before James came to visit, and we're not so sure we had enough time with it - it being at integral part of our therapy. We know we should though, because even with a therapists help, mapping can take months, sometimes years.

Since coming to England a few of our alters have stayed in the background, wanting to watch, but not take any control, and some not even be here. Joy hasn't been around much, we miss her a lot, as does James. She doesn't like James' flat, so she can't be bothered with coming out. Emmie has been MIA since about the time we moved in with The Mother, before leaving to England. (Emmie hates her) and she also doesn't like James' flat, she likes nice things, and fancy stuff, nice beds and showers. The rest probably have their own good reasons.

I know for some of you this sounds insane...that's okay; all that we care about it that we understand it.

~ Cassandra

Tomorrow's post will be from Kerry, our friend from Twitter who spent the weekend with a few of us. Apparently she's been asked by people in her life outside of Twitter, and people on Twitter, what we're like (like we're a freak show or something)...so check back tomorrow when we post what she had to say about us...or at least some of us...

*Dissociative Identity Disorder Terminology

Personality Specifics
Alter: alter states, selves, parts (a subjective term); distinct personalities; fragments 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.

The Core: The original birth personality.

Host: is the alter personality who dominates the control of the body most of the time and is often unaware of the other personalities. The host is usually the alter personality who will initiate after experiencing symptoms of mental distress, such as, anxiety, triggers or recovered memories.

Executive: When a personality (alter ego) has control of the body.

Switch: To switch from one personality to another. The process of an alter coming out from the subconscious mind into the consciousness mind while the other alter (who was already in the consciousness mind) slips back into the subconscious mind.

Who's out? A common question used to determine which personality is executive or host.

Co-conscious(ness): A state of being aware of what the other personalities are doing and saying.

Other Terms: 
Acquired: Anything that is not present at birth but develops some time later. In medicine, the word "acquired" implies "new" or "added." An acquired condition is "new" in the sense that it is not genetic (inherited) and "added" in the sense that was not present at birth.

Triggers: Conversion symptoms or body memories. Physical phenomenon such as pain, smells, tastes, etc.;  reaction to stimuli; sometimes causing a re-experience.

Dissociation: In psychology and psychiatry, a perceived detachment of the mind from the emotional state or even from the body. Dissociation is characterized by a sense of the world as a dreamlike or unreal place and may be accompanied by poor memory of the specific events, which in severe form is known as dissociative amnesia.

Re-live: A total memory recall (includes visual, emotional, physical and all other senses).

Losing Time: Also known as a Dissociative Fugue, is the period of which an alter personality is in the subconscious mind and has no recollection of the time that is being utilized by the alter personality who is occupying the conscious mind. Therefore when the alter switches into the conscious mind they realize that minutes, hours, days, or even months and years have passed since they were last aware of time.

System: is the structure of relationships between the alter personalities who live within the internal world of a survivor with D.I.D.! Every system is created and operates in it's own unique way, just like every family living in their own homes run their households different from the next door neighbor.

Inner (Self) Helper: is usually the alter personality who has a good understanding of the system and how it works. The I.S.H. is also among the typical group of helpers or protector personalities.

Grounding: is the process of disrupting a dissociative episode and is accomplished by tugging on an earlobe, rubbing the hands together, or shuffling the feet back and forth. This type of physical stimuli can bring the survivors mind back to awareness of their surroundings, and helps to make them feel less animated.

Under The Radar

Fuck you.
Fuck you and fuck him.
Tell him that you are the only one that loves him – tell him.
Tell him he can leave any time he wants. Get him away from us.
Tell him we hate him, that we don’t like him. I don’t like you.
He is going to use us.
He is just going to be like all the rest you know. You will make us all do things we don’t want to do because you love him. We are not Emmie.
I didn't want to do that and you wouldn’t speak up, and he can’t read our body signals, and he didn't want to read them because he wanted what he wanted. You’ll let him have anything. I hate you and I hate him.
He is still a man you know, he only tells you he loves us because he thinks it will make it easier for him to get the things he wants from us. Look at him acting like he cares that he hurt you.
I told you no. You don’t listen to me, you don’t stick up for us because you are too afraid to hurt his feelings.
Push him away.
Shove him away.
Don’t let him touch us. Tell him to stop fucking touching us. Tell him to stop calling us 'Baby'
Tell him to leave the apartment. Tell him to go away.
Make him stop fucking touching us.
I HATE YOU BOTH.

I’m laying motionless on the bed. These are the things screaming in my head. I can’t move. I can’t speak. I am speechless, but whoever is in our head space is not. I know basically what has just happened. We are naked, the details are too intimate to write, but we know. They are telling me to say these things; they are telling me these things about how they feel. I feel numb. I won’t speak to James. I can’t. I don’t know the words. It’s not his fault. He thinks it’s his fault. He is apologizing over and over. This feels horrible.

I cry as I lay there, no words will come out, only tears streaming down my face as I am screamed at by an angry alter. I don’t know what just happened. I am not sure who that was. I feel ashamed and I am scared.

~Frank.

Be Nice To Charlie Sheen

Today is one of those days where we are running on "auto-pilot" for the most part, some things we get, some things we don't. We've been floating back and forth for the last couple of days between knowing who we are, and then being not so sure; because we are used to this is does not alarm us, now we are just discussing amongst us who we are today (knock, knock! Who's there?). There are some consistences, luckily, because there are things we agree on, and some shared memory, there are some constants in our life.

There are things we agree on, like, that we have to go to work, to pay our bills - even though we need to ask to be reminded sometimes about what to do at work - and keep lists of tasks we to repeat every week, and we misplace everything, and lose stuff...including people. We agree we have to write everyday, so we can keep track of ourselves - at last little. We agree that we love FNA.

So here's the thing about shifting between us, and other us's...we started this entry last night and while taking a quick break and Tweeting, we got a pounding headache when someone said something rude to us, someone who reads our blog, and thinks we should just suck it up, because "bad things happen to everybody". Mean things people say to the mentally ill, mean things people say when they don't understand everybody has a different brain, just like everybody has a different body. While there are consistencies, there can be dramatic differences. Pick up a nonfiction book about history, and a book about chick-lit. Visually they are the same, they have pages and a cover, and words. Open them up, they are different. 

If you are lost in that analogy, we can't help you.

So when this thing was said to us, our head pounded hard, we got a little dizzy, and when we came back to work on the rest of what we were writing....we didn't remember where we were going to go with what we were writing. Which actually has happened a lot to us. Luckily it kind of makes sense, even if there is no real conclusion. (but does there have to be?)

To keep track of what we all write, we're leaving the original entry, we'll just clean it up a bit for spelling, grammar and punctuation....so here you have it....we don't know who wrote it, we only know who came here while we were writing and gave up, because he doesn't like to write much about nonsense.

So, here you go. We'll say goodbye here and let you read about Charlie Sheen.

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[the links below are to offsite locations that contain information about whatever is highlighted]

Okay, so it's no secret that we, as in us, take up resident in Franks head, we have Dissociative Identity Disorder (link to our DID Info page), a mental health condition. We are open about it for a variety reasons, all of which are scattered around this blog along with wonderful and beautiful things we have written, stories of our life, pictures of our artwork, drivel and the ramblings of few of Us that have problems. So, we're mentally ill. And being mentally ill we can recgize our own...like, the real ones; probably in the same way gay men can really "smell his own", so goes it for the mentally ill. At least these mentally ill ones.

We know this, for a fact - people who have afflictions similar to ours, we can see the recognition in their eyes. We cannot tell you why at this time because it would give a little too much information to our local readers; of which we assume we have a few, ones that actually don't know who we are, in addition to the ones who knew The Other Girl; this information would also give away too much about our general life.

So, you're saying, what the hell does this have to do with Charlie Sheen?

When Charlie Sheen first started to unravel, we thought it was drugs that caused him problems. And so we played around with his #tigerblood and poked fun, depending on the day, about his #winning status. As time moved on, and reports came in about he may not have been on drugs when he was rambling about Tigerblood, having passed his drug test; we thought,..."that's strange". Someone suggested he could have went off cocaine/drugs for a few days, as cocaine only last in the system for about 3 days. Think about a drug addict, of proportions that people assumed Charlie Sheen is/was. Do you really think someone with a real drug problem could easily go off of cocaine...for three days...and still keep his shit together? He didn't have his shit together when he was theoretically ON drugs. Going off drugs, if he indeed had as much of a problem as the media and the public claimed he had, would require Treatment. Like with other movie stars....are you following this now?

So, thinking about this we realized, that the secret to being able to completely lose your shit, something we are slipping nearer and nearer to on any given day...is to have so much money that people discount it as not serious. Must be fucking nice.

What we don't like, when we observe from our end of it, is how disturbing it is that people don't see a man who just might...just might need some real help.

He got booed in Cleveland...he has been rambling about shit that makes no sense. (even though this asshole from the Telegraph thinks differently <- its called having the money to be mentally ill - other people have to keep their shit together, and work hard at it - because they HAVE TO - please note: this comment was added by the personality that wrote the beginning of this entry)

And people, in all their reality TV stupidness, they eat it up with a a huge spoon - buying tickets to watch this man in his mentally ill breakdown perform like a monkey on stage, and then have the audacity to boo and critique it. He's the rich brother of the village idiot. And people are capitalizing on it. Even if he is too, it doesn't matter.

We may be off base, it could all be an act - if it, then he's a giant GIANT douche bag - and a fantastic actor; but we've talked to a couple people about this and they seem to agree. Somebody needs to get that man some help. Ignorant.

Look at him. We know that look. Be nice to him.