it me

prof dx: did (poly-fragmented), cptsd, ocd, psychosis, and i dont remember the rest so i'll add as i do || this is a place for neurodivergent stuff and i’m talking to my selves || reblog anything you want

[puppydeathfarts]

DID Awareness Day

Last week Dee asked, “What’s the point in an awareness day?”

I had no idea but said confidently, “DUHHHH, you know, it’s about sharing things that people with DID should be more aware of!”

At some point recently, she made this! I googled what awareness days are for and feel a bit silly, ahem. Thing is, maybe we missed the point a bit, but I wish I’d known all of this years ago so I’m posting it anyway :D

<3 Nick

General Things You Should Know 

DID/OSDD Casually Explained, by our friends @clever-and-unique-name 

Dissociated States in DID, in pictures

Grounding Basics, from did-toolbox.com (shameless plug!)

Dear Little Ones by Jade Miller, a video readthrough of the book that explains DID to little parts

“Was my childhood bad enough?”

Age and dissociative parts, Kay’s perspective

Havening, a tool to make things less triggering

How you’re DOING vs how you’re FEELING, and why it matters

Phase-Oriented Treatment - Phase 1 Goals, Skills & Resources

The dangers of investment in DID as a lifestyle

Imitative DID, what the textbooks have to say

Excessive Behavior Scale discussion, and then actual handout you can use, aka the mirror nobody likes to look into

Dissociative Experiences Log, a handout from our therapist that helps with tracking dissociation

Things Fictional Introjects are and are not from friends @dissociatingdingo​

How to make real apologies

Mindfulness! You CAN do Mindfulness if you have a dissociative disorder, but it’s not about drifting off and watching your thoughts.

The 5 Building Blocks of Present Moment Experience

Building a Good Experience

Directed Mindfulness is actually pretty helpful! 

Integration

Dissociation & Integration by @multiplicityandme​ #EducaDID

Our first “planned activity” aka integration practice

3 benefits of our integration work, similar to sharing our “super-powers”,   

Integration with Ana, our experience

Healthy integration vs. “forced” integration

Our most recent system map

Book Club: Coping with Trauma Related Dissociation

I threw the coping book across the room twice trying to read the first chapter. I mentioned it to a friend and it turned out I wasn’t alone! This book is easier to handle if you read it with friends, and that’s the idea of book club. As you read each chapter, feel free to comment or reblog, adding your experiences. Did you do the homework? How did it go? What kind of emotional reaction are you having to the material? How much of the content do you remember? Are the techniques helping? Write anything you like, really.

Some of the chapters:

Understanding Dissociation

Symptoms of Dissociation

Understanding Dissociative Parts of the Personality

Symptoms of PTSD in Complex Dissociative Disorders

Overcoming the Phobia of Inner Experience

Learning to Reflect

Beginning Work with Parts, Continued, now with pictures

Developing an Inner Sense of Safety

Improving Sleep

Healthy Daily Structure

Understanding Emotions

Our favorite books, in recommended reading order:

CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving - Pete Walker

Coping with Trauma Related Dissociation - Boon, Steele and van der Hart

Sensorimotor Psychology - Ogden & Fisher

The Body Keeps The Score - Bessel van der Kolk

The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization - van der Hart, Nijenhuis and Steele 

Treating Trauma Related Dissociation -  Boon, Steele and van der Hart

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors - Fisher

Bonus: Finding Your Best Self: Recovery from Addiction, Trauma or Both - Najavits. Read it 1st if you’re struggling with a dual diagnosis and don’t have much in the way of support.

[puppydeathfarts]

DID-oriented mindfulness is a thing?!

We’re doing exercises from this book about sensorimotor psychotherapy. It’s pretty easy to follow, workbook style, and each topic has a section that explains how to adapt the material for patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder / OSDD. Pretty cool, imo!

Today I hit a large section of chapters about mindfulness, and kinda rolled my eyes a bit. I’ve tried apps, books, professional coaches and multi-day training seminars. None of it worked. As soon as I try to observe my thoughts, I’m in my thoughts. I would force my way through and end sessions in an anxious, distracted or overwhelmed muddle. Attempts to let silence happen are drowned out with intrusions, for all of us, and it’s kinda upsetting.

The introduction cleared that up quickly by redefining mindfulness in this context:

The authors encourage being aware of your building blocks intentionally, and one method is to ask yourself questions. “What is telling me that I’m triggered or upset right now? The change in my breathing? The tension in my throat?”; “What thoughts are coming up as I see my boss frown?”; “What does my jaw clench mean?”, and so on. 

You can also check your building blocks while doing fun things, like petting an animal, gardening, and eating a crunchy fruit. Learning to stop and name these building blocks, the components of any experience, is the goal. You need it to be a well honed skill for the upcoming chapters. (Safe-inner-place and containment work are most effective when you can use all 5 building blocks to reinforce them, too.)

I keep this thing handy on notepads, digital devices, at my desk, etc. It feels like a lot more progress than all the other mindfulness things we’ve tried so far, in just the first few days. Trying to make sure we all stick with it. Body-awareness is kinda our top priority right now. :| 

[clever-and-unique-name]

“Based on understandable reasons, these parts of you that are phobic of attachment often have intense reactions to the parts of you that want to have relationships and feel a desperate need to be with another person. Because they realize that having needs in the past was hurtful to you, they may viciously attack these parts, humiliating and despising them. Although this misguided behavior is hurtful to you as a whole person, the original intent was one of protection, since rigidly suppressing your needs might have been the only protection possible in the past… Yet it is essential for you to understand and develop empathy for these parts who really only want to protect you from further harm: They just need to learn more healthy ways of doing so.”

– “Coping With Trauma-Related Dissociation,” Boon, Steele, van der Hart

[unwelcome-ozian]

People who believe that they know what is best for other people are denying other people’s truths. Whenever our own truth is denied, ignored or invalidated we experience the greatest fear we can ever know: the threat of the annihilation of our self.“ — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Atlantique (Mati Diop, 2019)

[retrogradeszn-deactivated202109]

daily affirmation:

i love myself. i deserve respect and i will not tolerate any less. i am worthy of love being who i am in my entirety. i do not need to change who i am for public approval. i am allowed to love myself in my entirety. i am not worthless just because others fail to see my worth. i am content in who i am regardless of where i am in my journey. i do not need the approval of others.

[unchildhood]

ANAÏS NIN

from a diary entry featured in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

original photos and edit

[sae-something]

“Lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are typically found to accompany the distress states caused by early trauma. Infants cannot experience themselves as being “a good person in a bad situation”. Failure of the holding environment is experienced as failure of the self. Infants who experience early trauma of any kind experience the early environmental failure as if there were something wrong with them. Later cognitions such as “There is something basically wrong with me” or “I am bad” are built upon the early somatic sensation “I feel bad.””

— Heller & LaPierre (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. 

[depresseddisneyprincess]

turning the age you thought you’d kill yourself before is wild

[dreamers-and-seekers]

And then continuing to surpass it is also wild…

[thefibrodiaries]

invisible disabilities are not totally invisible. if you look close enough, I mean really look at us. you’ll see how we walk differently. how our faces contort in pain. how our jaws clench. how our shoulders are tense.how our hands tremble. how our breathing is laboured. how we struggle with the simplest of things. our disabilities are not really invisible. people are just too ignorant to notice our suffering and pain.

[dissociated-nyx]

Emotionally immature parents fear genuine emotion and pull back from emotional closeness. They use coping mechanisms that resist reality rather than dealing with it. They don’t welcome self-reflection, so they rarely accept blame or apologize. Their immaturity makes them inconsistent and emotionally unreliable, and they’re blind to their children’s needs once their own agenda comes into play.

— Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C Gibson

[openblogtomyabusivemother]

[wendsisdrivinthismeatship]

Being chronically ill is like being a phone that can’t charge past, like, 30%. You can do a good chunk of stuff when at 30%, but not as much as you’d like to before it has the go on the charger. You know when you’re charging your phone but you need to do something really quick but the charger cord won’t reach so you just take it off for a second, but it’s only at 10% so it’s constantly giving you the notification to put it back on the charger? That’s what it’s like to get up to do anything be it get a drink, go pee, check on sleeping family, whatever, at night. You are constantly being reminded by your body you need to get back to sleep and soon, but you know that you can do this small task at 10%, because you’ve done it at 3% before when you were absolutely desperate, but it doesn’t make it any less nerve-wracking because if your phone’s over heating or you left the brightness all the way up, or you misread the percentage, that 10% can go right to a power down before you get it back on the charger. People understand “I don’t wanna leave the house yet, my phone’s only at 27%” but don’t quite get “I can’t leave the house yet, my body is only at 10%, if I left now I wouldn’t make it back home safe”

[hunterinabrowncoat]

Self harm doesn’t always happen when a blade touches skin.

It’s skipping meals because you don’t feel like you deserve to eat today. It’s having sex because you want to be used or abused or defiled. It’s drinking recklessly because you might have the ‘courage’ do something stupid. It’s smoking - not because you need the nicotine - because you know it’s bad for you. It’s banging your head against a wall when you’re angry. It’s crossing the road without looking because you lowkey hope a car might hit you. It’s thinking about all the ways you could break a bone and make it look like an accident. It’s not taking painkillers because you want to suffer. It’s taking painkillers in excess because you know it’s dangerous. It’s walking home the more dangerous way because you’re kind of half hoping you’ll get attacked or raped or stabbed. It’s going for long walks at night and getting chilled to the bone and hoping that you get lost so that you can’t find your way back. It’s seeking out triggering material. It’s all the stupid little ways you punish yourself for existing.

Sometimes self harm happens when you put effort into depriving yourself of things you like or need, and sometimes it happens when you don’t put any effort into doing the things you like or need.

It’s a pattern of self-destructive behaviour, and it doesn’t only happen in one way.

[maemaybe]

I’ve decided I’m not going to call it my “trauma” anymore, I’m going to call it my “lore”. 

My therapist: What do you want to talk about today?

Me: Well I’ve been thinking about where we left off in the lore… 

[manie-sans-delire-x]

You expect people who have had horrific lives to be 100% good people all the time but you’ve had a good life and aren’t that great of a person in proportion to it

[swordsking-deactivated20210811]

life rlly is all about searching for tenderness when all ur life you’ve been presented with anger, aggression, neglect, shame, guilt tripping etc etc. like, I refuse to die without feeling at least a bit of warmth in this life…

[satanscervix]

frankly.