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.

A Profound Appt with My CPN

Posted on by Astrid

Yesterday I had another appt with my community psychiatric nurse (CPN). At first, we went into how I’m doing at the moment. Then my CPN scheduled some appts for me with my nurse practitioner. Last Monday, after all, he and the behavior specialist from my care facility had finally come to the conclusion that I need to do some work on stabilizing myselves and developing inner cooperation before I can do EMDR or another form of trauma therapy. At first, the secretary said the first appt she had available was late December. It turned out to be December 17, so that’s pretty early considering how long I’ve been waiting already.

Then we got to discuss some issues relating to my diagnosis or the lack thereof. These were mostly theoretical, since I have no idea what my current diagnosis is and I really don’t care. I mean, the most recent treatment guidelines here in the Netherlands for complex dissociative disorders, aren’t suited to me (or most plurals, honestly), so I have no reason to want such a diagnosis. All I want is help in getting the inner turmoil under control.

Then I somehow got to mention my former psychiatrist’s comment when first considering assessing me for DID/OSDD in the summer of 2018. She held both of my hands and said: “You have just one body.” Then she went on to explain that, while she was holding our hands, none of us could put our fingers in our ears and pretend not to listen.

We then repeated this exercise. A staff always attends our appts with mental health with us. She now held both our hands and said that we can stay at the care facility. Someone asked cautiously: “Even if I need more help than I get now?” She then reassured us that yes, even if we need more help, we can stay here.

Then the staff asked our CPN what she’s supposed to do when we openly switch, as we had the day before. My CPN seemed not to know, so I suggested she do not elicit it, but do not fight it when it happens either. After all, when she insists that “Astrid” come back, this may create some trouble since “Astrid” is either everyone or no-one at all.

I really hope our nurse practitioner isn’t going to insist people only talk to “Astrid”, as the current guidelines on DID/OSDD seem to suggest as far as I know. I mean, we are okay all listening to the body’s name and won’t sign our names on E-mails or the like when it’s not appropriate, but one of our main issues is that there is no host who somehow “owns” the others. As such, the daily living parts or apparently normal parts or whatever don’t have access to every bit of information needed to cooperate.

Not Quite a (Traumagenic) System?

Posted on by Astrid

I feel so awful right now. The visit from my parents went so well and this is actually confusing me. I mean, I consider some of my childhood experiences traumatic. Quite a few, in fact. How can this be the case if I have such loving parents? I mean, yes, they’re still a bit odd. My father just talked about the birds and butterflies and flowers we encountered. He didn’t ask me any questions or share anything about himself. That doesn’t make him a CPTSD-engendering parent though.

I had a dream yesterday about me needing to take the SCID-D assessment for dissociative disorders and it came back showing that I don’t have a dissociative disorder. It was probably triggered by my having read a message in a DID support group about how plurality is now something anyone can claim because of endogenic (born multiple) systems etc. We’re not an endogenic system, but can we claim to be traumagenic? Can we even claim to be a system at all?

I mean, other than online and to a few specific people who know us closely, we don’t share our names. It could just be that I gave names to different emotions or aspects of myself that I find hard to understand. This is what my community psychiatric nurse said on our last appointment. She said the consultant recommending EMDR for my traumatic experiences hadn’t recommended any type of “deep-digging” therapy. Not that I want that, but on some deep level (no pun intended), her claim that my parts are feelings, made me feel invalidated.

I told my CPN that, whichever treatment approach I try, my parts always show up and disrupt the process. She countered that we hadn’t tried EMDR yet. I know, but this approach is known to cause worsening of dissociation in those with dissociative disorders. Can it get me to “split” even more, even if I’m not a genuine multiple in the first place?

When I shared my doubts/denial on an E-mail list for DID, someone replied that I sign my E-mails with lots of different names. Well, that’s as easy as typing on a keyboard. No-one needs to have any special characteristics to be able to do this. It doesn’t prove my multiplicity. Besides, I know there are parts and they have names, but are these parts truly differentiated enough?

In a sense, it doesn’t matter. I’m not planning on seeking a DID/OSDD diagnosis anytime soon and by the time I might have overcome my fear of psychological evaluations, I guess DID has been removed from the DSM. Either that or Onno van der Hart and other scandalous therapists have given it such a bad name that no-one in the whole country will support me. And that’s even assuming that said assessment would show some type of dissociative disorder. Then again, if I’m claiming plurality for the sake of it, am I not contributing to the stigma surrounding DID myself?

In addition to the dream I had yesterday, I have recurring dreams about my parents finding out I’m in childhood trauma survivor support groups. They always confront me and my husband always sides with them. I guess I should leave those groups in case it really happens. I mean, I’m not an adult child of normal parents, maybe, but then again who is?

DID Awareness Day and Plural Pride Day 2019

Posted on by Astrid

Today is DID Awareness Day and Plural Pride Day. I really want to share something for it, but I struggle with knowing what to share. I haven’t written about our experience of being plural in a long while, so maybe today I should jump at the opportunity. For today’s post, I am just going to introduce the subject of DID and our system to people who may not be aware.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a trauma-based mental health condition in which the sufferer experiences two or more distinct identities or personality states, each with their own unique way of perceiving and relating to the world. People with DID also have amnesia for important information either in the present or past that is too extensive to be due to ordinary forgetfulness. People who do not have this type of amnesia, or whose identities are not fully formed, may be diagnosed with other specified dissociative disorder (OSDD) type 1A or 1B.

We were diagnosed with DID in 2010. At the time, we could be pretty in your face about ourselves, because we were in an environment where we felt relatively safe to be ourselves. This, however, also opened us up to suggestion, as our therapist concluded pretty early in the process that we have DID. Normally, a diagnosis of full-fledged DID is not made after initial assessment, but requires at least six months of therapy with a DID therapist.

Anyway, we probably do experience some level of amnesia, but didn’t know how to explain it to our therapist. For this reason, we would report we didn’t remember something, even though we showed in our actions that we did. This got people to assume we were faking our amnesia and by extension the whole dissociative experience.

When we moved from one psychiatric institution into another in 2013, we no longer felt safe. We actively denied the alters and started to explain ourselves away as bad moods. That’s probably one reason our diagnosis was changed from DID to borderline personality disorder (BPD). My next psychologist, some years later still, went so far as to say we invented our DID because we felt it’d be an interesting diagnosis. Well, no.

We first became aware of ourselves in the summer of 2001, when the body was fifteen. At the time, the host didn’t see the alters as part of herself. In fact, if I reread my diary from back then, it felt as though I was bordering on psychosis. I wasn’t though.

In early 2004, the alters started to appear more and claim their own names. We denied having “multiple personalities”, but only on the grounds that we didn’t lose time. Like I said above, while this could rule out full-fledged DID, it doesn’t necessarily do so (identity amnesia and amnesia for past events also counts), and it still means we’re multiple, ie. diagnosable with OSDD.

Currently, we don’t have a diagnosis of a dissociative disorder. We’re not ready to undergo the assessment process for it, as psychological assessments are a huge trigger for us. However, here we are, all 26 or so of us.