An Intense Monday

Posted on by Astrid

I’m not really sure what I want to write today. I started writing this blog post several times, only to delete it again halfway through. I intended on doing a food diary, then realized I wasn’t intending on sharing it here. (I did write a food log in Day One, my diary app, for today.) I then tried to do a more general health and wellness log, only to realize these don’t make sense if I don’t do them regularly. Then I started writing a post about today.

Today was, indeed, rather intense. Not really because of the food journal. I did okay on that one and it helped me make some healthy choices without becoming obsessive about it.

In the morning, a staff made a phone call to the assistive tech company. Yeah, my Braille display is once again broken, for the fifth or so time in eighteen months. I can still work around all the stuck dots, but I really want it repaired.

Then in the afternoon, I had an appt with my nurse practitioner. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about. I mean, yes, he shared about the bus metaphor. This is a metaphor in which a person is like a bus driver and all their thoughts etc. are passengers on the bus. I had already commented last time that my bus has multiple drivers, in that, if I hear a voice commanding me to do something, that voice (ie. alter) can take over the wheel too. Now I am hesitant to use words like “alter”, because I know my nurse practitioner doesn’t believe I have a dissociative disorder. This is my blog though so I can do with it what I want.

Today we somehow got talking about this metaphor in relation to emotions. Sometimes, you see, I get an emotion or urge or whatever and have no clue why. Honestly I can’t remember how this relates to the bus metaphor, but oh well. Oh yes, I told my nurse practitioner that Astrid is the bus with all its passengers and drivers. The body, then, is the bus.

Later, in the evening, we had an emotional reaction to a minor situation. After I calmed down, I talked it over with the staff who’d seen me have the reaction and it turned out I had no memory of it. I can now sort of see how I probably had that reaction, but I still can’t remember it as my own reaction.

This makes me feel kind of freaked out. I know that amnesia is part of dissociation, but didn’t we agree that I don’t have a dissociative disorder? Besides, whenever I do claim to have an undiagnosed dissociative disorder, it’s OSDD1B, which means having alters without significant amnesia.

I knew from previous experiences that I do experience what’s called emotional amnesia, where I can remember something but not the feels that go with it. The incident of amnesia that got my former psychologist, back in 2010, to suspect DID, was, in fact, emotional amnesia only. I know this because I claimed that I’d not remembered what went on in our session, but I clearly must’ve remembered something as otherwise I wouldn’t have known to tell her.

I know I don’t need a diagnosis right now. I can function okay’ish most of the time. Or can I? After all, when I’m functioning, I can’t remember that sometimes I am not and when I’m in severe distress, I can’t remember what it’s like to function normally. Or maybe I can, on some level. This is all so confusing.

Co-Consciousness #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) is “Co-“. I immediately thought of co-consciousness. This is a term in the DID (dissociative identity disorder) / multiple personality community referring to more than one personality sharing memories or other information. It is often desired as a goal in treatment. Another one is cooperation, in which alters are able to work together for the betterment of the entire system of personalities and the body.

Co-consciousness is often implied to mean a system has less severe dissociation. I mean, since amnesia (inability to recall important information) is a criterion for DID, technicallyy those who are fully co-conscious cannot be diagnosed with DID. Then again, there are a lot of degrees of amnesia. For example, one is time loss, where someone “wakes up” to discover their alter has done something they have no recollection of. However, identity amnesia also counts, where a person forgets their name, age, etc. Loss of skills also counts, where a person cannot for example ride a bicycle or car when a young alter is out in the body.

There is also this phenomenon called emotional amnesia. I have yet to find out more about it, as it seems to be very common in our experience. For example, last Wednesday, we were aggressive. Though I do know that we kicked a wall, I do not actually remember it or the feeling attached to it. That belongs to one of the other personalities.

We do aim to share information amongst ourselves. However, usually we cannot all be present at the same time. That is, of course we can, in that we’re all in this body and when for example I give someone my hands, another alter cannot be simultaneously holding our hands over our ears. That’s what our psychiatrist explained last year and it was so fundamentally new to us!

Co-consciousness and cooperation can be an end goal in DID treatment, but some systems choose to merge or integrate. There are also different degrees of integration or so I understand. I recently joined a support group on Facebook specifically for DID systems looking to integrate, even though that’s always been a very scary idea to most of us. It feels as though we’re getting rid of some of us, when really all of us are part of this system, inhabit this body.

As a side note, I can totally understand most regular #SoCS readers cannot fathom the concepts I just wrote about. I was even once told by people in a Dutch DID community that I knew too much for someone who’d only been diagnosed for a few months, when I mentioned the term “co-consciousness”. Clearly those people had never ventured out into the English-speaking DID community.