#ololygon

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Ololygon albicans by Mauro Teixeira Jr

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Ololygon brieni by João P. Burini

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Ololygon aromothyella by marco_vicariotto

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Ololygon argyreornata by Renato Augusto Martins

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Ololygon berthae by fbio

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Ololygon agilis by Luis Felipe Toledo

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Ololygon alcatraz, source: x

[maemaybe]

hey! i know you have a lot on at the moment, so feel free to not answer/take your time on this one. do you have any thoughts on developing a more cohesive sense of identity/self through the lens of DID?

I’ve been thinking about this question over the last day and I realized that I couldn’t pinpoint “the one thing” that helped. It’s been such a long process and I’ve made so many small changes. I don’t really know which variables made the most difference for me. 

I know that one of the big changes I made a few years ago is that I began tuning-out content that fed the kind of thinking I was trying to change. In most other areas of my life, I enjoy being able to listen to people I disagree with and hear alternate points of view. In this one aspect of my life, it became really important that I stop listening to people that reinforced ideas that I was trying to let go of. Language has power, and language that reinforced the view that “alters are completely separate people” and should be treated that way was unhelpful for my recovery. 

Another change I made was that I stopped worrying about tracking switching and knowing exactly who was fronting. It was a question that constantly caused me distress in the past and letting go of it gave me a lot of relief. Instead of worrying about who was fronting, when I felt particularly strong influence from parts I would ask “what parts am I noticing?” which gave me the freedom to notice all the parts present, not just the loudest and most in-control parts. 

I guess one of the things that helped me develop a more cohesive sense of identity was simply gaining the understanding that my system was far more complex than I had previously understood. My initial understanding of my system was that we were “5 distinct separate people sharing a body” which made me view us as these very separate entities were no overlap and little in common besides the physical form that we shared. 

This might sound counter-intuitive, but as I found more and more parts of my system and that number climbed from 5 to 15, to 30 and counting, I stopped seeing us as these distinctly separate people and began seeing us as the overlapping layers that we are. I could see how we blurred into each other and I could see that we weren’t quite as distinct as I’d thought before. When I began to see the connections between us, and I began to see how we all fit together, I could see the wholeness of us. 

Finally, I really began to lean into the life that I was creating in the present and I invited every part of me to join it. So many parts of my system were unaware of how much time had passed, unaware that we are an adult, living on our own, in a safe place. So I began taking the time to show them our life and when that started having positive results I took pleasure in making our life a better one for them. Nurturing a good life in the here and now and bringing all parts of my system into it really helped our sense of cohesion. It is hard to have a safe, stable, cohesive system when parts of it believe that it is 2001 and they are unsafe.