🎶

Main is @juniperspolyphony We’re Juniper, an adult C-DID system and this is our side blog talking about our life with various mental illnesses, trauma, healing, integration and fusion. There are aspects of our trauma we will not talk about publically. Do not assume you know what we’ve been through, and do not assume that the way you heal is the way we should heal. Opinions and views may vary between alters. In therapy.

[wulpertingertalk]

pessimist vs optimist FIGHT

[the-wilds-system]

Littles that swear are normal

Littles that are sensitive to swearing are normal

Littles that are happy go lucky are normal

Littles that hold trauma are normal

Littles that take care of the system are normal

Littles that can't function on their own are normal

Littles that aren't aware of / can't handle mature content are normal

Littles that are aware of / can handle mature content are normal

there's no one way littles should be, or one set of boundaries that apply to all littles in every system ever

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.

[reasonablywittyatbest]

It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.

I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.

[sunspotpony]

Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”

Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

important

In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."

[headspace-hotel]

I had this realization a while back:

Some kids who experienced trauma would react by becoming violent, disruptive, and rageful.

This is an inherently normal and natural response for a creature to have. Attacking and fighting for survival is inherently something most animals sometimes do, it's fundamental and will always happen sometimes

But children that are violent, disruptive, hateful of authority, or angry are labeled as "bad" and are punished for it, and the label of "bad" is not just temporary but lasts a long time, as though there is something fundamentally wrong with the child

So, I thought, a child's value in the world and whether they deserve to be helped is judged in this harsh, punitive way, based on whatever natural survival response happened to pop out of them

And I thought, that is grotesque. It means that a certain fraction of traumatized kids will not be helped, but instead be considered "bad," because of basically a biological thing that their body had to do to survive.

Also it is a good point about perpetrator trauma. People are very caught up in the idea that PTSD means the same thing as being a victim, or that you have to be "innocent" to be traumatized. And many people think that people that are not "innocent" are not really traumatized, they just act like they are to get sympathy.

But in reality people can get PTSD from killing another person or torturing them or harming them in another way. Committing that violent act against another person is very devastating emotionally and mentally.

And sometimes people think that perpetrators don't deserve help for their trauma, as if trauma is a punishment for doing something bad.

Society has to change a lot for us to understand these things and truly be compassionate towards all people.

[reddragoncollective]

Before you make a post about how the morality/beliefs of each and every one of your alters represents your morality/beliefs as a person, remember that you are describing a disorder in which the most common type of introject is of an abuser. Yes, you are your alters, but this has nuance. Your mind did not consider your own moral compass when it split the parts it thought you needed, it was simply trying to survive. Acceptance must come first for healing and growth to come later.

[healingpolyphony]

The last two weeks (but moreso week) we’ve been in a horrible dissociative haze. Can’t ground properly, can’t figure out which alter is fronting if anyone’s fronting at all, feelings like I’m everyone and no one and we’re just puppeting our body around. We feel like we’re acting almost, like we’re trying to “act” normal but everyone we’ve seen has confirmed that we’re acting weird

I wish this would stop, idk what to do

[winningmachine]

Being small Nobody quite recovers from being a child: the asymmetry of power between parents and children always leaves a trace

[silence-is-underrated]

No actually they're loud as fuck

[fontainians]

System communities need to get normal about littles who are sexual trauma holders

System communities need to get normal about littles who have other “adult” roles

System communities need to get normal about abuser introjects

System communities need to get normal about RAMCOA/OEA survivors

System communities need to get normal about systems who’s trauma wasn’t parental abuse and/or sa (this is not me saying that people who did go through that are invalid, but that theres a lack of resources or support for different types of trauma)

System communities need to get normal about factives

[reeeneeereee]

(person who suspects they have ocd voice): what if every time i think something is an ocd symptom im actually faking it and stereotyping and ruining the lives of people with real ocd and im a terrible person

[healingpolyphony]

We had a rough therapy session which ended up with us having a 5+ hour trauma nap afterwards and I still feel like we could sleep for a week

Nothing feels real and I can’t even remember the session, wrote a post therapy recap like we do every session and have decided not to reread it because I don’t want to remember lol

Head hurts and I feel very unwell

[torstherapy]

[classifiedcove]

protective daydreaming

[bones-and-lichen]

Signs you’re experiencing a emotional flashback

Your emotions elude you. You try to figure out how the situation at hand could’ve caused that much of an reaction in you. You don’t understand the logic behind it up until you go all the way back to memories of where the feeling first emerged. Usually it will trace back to a traumatic instance, and a small detail, wrong sentence or other sensory input was enough to trigger a flood of emotions.

You get that sense of impending doom, like smth will absolutely go wrong even though you have no rational explanation for it.

If you usually enjoy touch, you’re suddenly averse to it and the idea of it becomes uncomfortable.

You might suddenly feel the need for someone to comfort you even though you’re not sure for what, or what you’re even feeling.

You suddenly get the strong urge to isolate yourself and hide, flee the situation or social interaction and burry your head in the sand until it feels “safe” enough to come out again.

You feel the excessive need to daydream and to escape reality suddenly but you don’t really know why.

You might notice symptoms of dissociation in your body. Your hands feel unreal. You feel disconnected from yourself all of a sudden.

Your sense of time changes.

Your emotions feel like they don’t really belong to you all of a sudden and you feel a strong need to keep that seperation up.

Intense gut wrenching shame right after the emotional flashback hits. Even if you can’t identify the emotional flashback, you can definitely identify that sudden shame.

Feeling a spike in paranoia, like people are against you, suddenly reading ill intent into other people’s actions even if you rationally know they aren’t doing anything to warrant your suspicion.

[asexual-amanita]

OCD is never about liking being clean or organized. I’ve never met a person with OCD who actually likes to do their compulsions. We do them because we’re terrified of what will happen if we don’t. It’s not preference that makes us act, it’s this false sense of urgency and extreme panic.

[torstherapy]

[thehousetenants]

sometimes i simply wish ppl would realize that while alters are a defining trait of CDDs that we are extremely traumatized people and have symptoms outside of the alters. you know. the trance states, the somatic symptoms like joint pain and stomachaches and headaches. the high comorbidity of eating disorders, of personality disorders, of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. alters are something to deal with, sure. theyre stressful. its messy, with persecutors. its not all bad, with alters, either. sometimes its warm and good. but i wish people realized the hardship of these disorders rather than glorifying and aestheticizing what so many of us are going through.

[moonjay-the-forest-spirit]

Something that maybe some people with out a CDD might not get about get about them is truly how covert switches can be. And I don't just mean the switches themselves but afterwards, people often expect the new fronting alter to be confused and maybe you'll hear a "where am I?" or a " Who are you?" If it's a part you haven't met. But that'd of course be very obvious and quite often dangerous and the disorder is about protection.

I've switched out in a house I as an alter haven't been to before and while my emotional side is very disorientated and a little anxious logically I know where I am and that we have been here before even if it doesn't feel it. And I just have to roll with it, mask act as though nothing has happened. The confusion and fear is there but I can't show it.