Denial, dissociation, and barriers between the functioning alters and the trauma-holding alters...
I'm noticing that a part of slowly getting better and moving away from crisis, at least for us, is denial that something's still (or was) actually wrong. And not even on a conscious, intentional level.
I dissociate heavily and freeze up when I try to look into non-crisis level treatment for our DID and CPTSD, and the only thought that I can muster in my head is, "We don't have trauma. I don't need this." I can only think anything else when I move away from the subject of treatment and memory integration, and it always leaves me frustrated.
I go in and out of moments where I'm suddenly back in crisis, and then I'm seemingly perfectly fine: functional, content, and happy with my life. We have alters whose job it is to hold that crisis state, to hold all the trauma, and everyone else's job is to forget and move on. To continue functioning.
To quote Janina Fisher (author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, linked in the DID/OSDD Community):
...The theory [of structural dissociation] describes (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis & Steele, 2006) how the brain's innate physical structure and two separate, specialized hemispheres facilitate left brain-right brain disconnection under conditions of threat. Capitalizing on the tendency of the left brain to remain positive, task-oriented, and logical under stress, these writers hypothesized that the disconnected left brain side of the personality stays focused on the tasks of daily living, while the other hemisphere fosters an implicit right brain self that remains in survival mode, braced for danger, ready to run, frozen in fear, praying for rescue, or too ashamed to do anything but submit...
This illustrates what I've been observing for the past three-or-so months perfectly. I've just barely come out of crisis treatment, and suddenly I can't approach the topic of healing at all, because it feels like anything negative or "bad" isn't "me" and isn't real, and therefore isn't my problem. Meanwhile, when we switch out with the trauma-holding alters, it feels as though anything positive or "good" isn't "me" and isn't real, and yet again, why approach treatment if the good still isn't mine and therefore unreachable?
From day to day and sometimes hour to hour, I find us switching and flipping between reverting to a highly traumatized, emotional, and upset state to a very healed, logical, and content state. All depending on our triggers throughout the day, who we're around, and who's fronting or lurking at the time.
And at the same time, it feels impossible to touch, as no matter which side of the mental health coin is fronting, we can't find a way to approach the idea of memory integration and healing. We're in denial, both in terms of conscious thought and in terms of being too dissociated from reality to acknowledge the information and resources at hand.
germansingergirl
gummygunk
izzy806
blakekathryn
discoholicmusic
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
