We Are Cinderella!

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all! Today, I discovered Throwback Thursday. Well, I had heard of it before, but always assumed it was an image-based blog hop, as this is what the term usually means. Not so in this case. Lauren and Maggie’s Throwback Thursday allows us to write a post taking a stroll down memory lane. I’m pretty sure photos are allowed, but the main focus seems on writing. Today’s topic is nicknames.

I have had many nicknames throughout my life. Some are derived from my name. For example, many people simply abbreviate “Astrid” to “As” and my husband and his family then add the commonly-Dutch “-ie” suffix for “little”, so my nickname becomes “Assie”. My husband and his two sisters all have -ie nicknames, with my husband Jeroen’s nickname, “Joenie”, being the most related to his actual name.

Then there are these nicknames that are based on some letters out of my name but not many. An example is the Dutch word “asbak” (which translates to “ashtray)”. I hate that nickname with a vengeance.

Another one is “Assepoester”. This is the Dutch name for Cinderella in the fairytale. I don’t like the Dutch nickname, but I for one do relate to Cinderella, particularly to the feeling of having to be transformed by a fairy (ie. put on a mask) in order to be acceptable as I am.

For this reason, I sometimes still use Cinderella as my nickname. That is, I do so when referring to myself and my multiple alter personalities (dissociative identities) as a system. Usually, I refer to the collective as Astridetal, as in my blog’s URL, but at one point we felt somehow like we needed a collective name that didn’t claim that Astrid was the “owner” of everyone else. So Cinderella System was born!

Did or do you have any interesting nicknames?

The Puzzle and Its Pieces #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

When I was first diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) in 2010, I was already aware of some of my alters. I at the time explained to my therapist that the body or “Astrid” was the puzzle and the alters were the pieces. In other words, there was no host who “owned” the other alters as such. I felt that we needed to cooperate as one collective, not as one piece.

I was, at the time, unaware of the other significant meaning of the puzzle piece in my mental health experience, that is, its symbolism in autism-related lobbying. I mean, Autism Speaks and other cure-focused organizations employed the puzzle piece as a symbol of something being “broken” or “missing” about us autistics. That’s why autistic activists are so vehemently against it.

I personally till this day don’t mind the puzzle piece as much. I mean, I don’t like it that Autism Speaks uses it, but other than that, I’m not sure what I think of the symbol. I’ve heard the alternative is something like a rainbow-colored infinity symbol or something, which I have absolutely no concept of, never having seen the infinity symbol when I still had enough vision to picture it.

I do think the puzzle is a great symbol for plurality in general and dissociative identity disorder in particular. Another one is the kaleidoscope, but I don’t like that one as it is the name of the Dutch DID charity. That one is very exclusionary and kicked me out on the basis of not having a diagnosis given to me by someone they approved of.

So, the puzzle. The pieces, when cooperating perfectly, make up the proper image of what should be “Astrid”. Then again, that’s an ideal. Hard to achieve. I don’t think we ever will. And that, in my opinion, is okay.

This post was written for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS), for which the prompt today is “Puzzle”.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (December 20, 2020)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi #WeekendCoffeeShare people, and everyone else too of course! Today is a cloudy, relatively mild day. I, as usual, just had my last drink for the day – just water today. If you’d like a cup of coffee, that’s fine by me though. Regardless, let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you my sister and her little family visited me on Monday. They were originally supposed to visit yesterday, but the prime minister was expected to announce a strict lockdown Monday evening. Spoiler alert: he didn’t. While all non-essential stores are closed, people are still allowed to leave their house and visit others. The care agency pandemic team also didn’t close my care facility.

The family consists of my sister, her husband and their 15-month-old daughter Janneke. Janneke was really cute. She isn’t walking or standing yet, but she does crawl around a lot. She can also say some words and is almost completely potty trained. My sister is really proud of her for that last thing.

We got takeout pizza for us adults and a bit of French fries for Janneke. I loved my salami pizza.

If we were having coffee, I would share that I had the first “therapy” appt with my nurse practitioner on Thursday. It didn’t really go well. Not that I’d expected it to, but I had hoped for a little less trivializing and rationalizing of my symptoms from both our sides. I know, we will maintain the status quo on the nature of my insiders until or unless I ever decide to get an assessment. It is pretty likely my nurse practitioner doesn’t even think I need one. After all, he said that considering my insiders to be an extreme form of doubt is a little off, but there’s no need to compare my symptoms to anything anyone else experiences. Well, honestly, yes, there is or we won’t be knowing where we’re headed at all. I think though that most of us prefer not having a clue what we’re doing to being told we’re all products of an attention-seeking, manipulative imagination.

If we were having coffee, lastly I would share that I went to Lobith yesterday. I had some conflicting feelings about it, but I was happy to see my husband. It was good. My husband and I talked faith extensively and he encouraged me to grow in my belief. My husband knows far more about the Bible than I do and he explained some about how to interpret various passages.

What have you been up to lately?

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.

Thankful Thursday (July 23, 2020): My Care Team

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone! How are you all doing on this warm Thursday evening? I’m doing a lot better than I was earlier this week. I could actually do an early gratitude list, as there’s more than one thing I’m grateful for. A simple list wouldn’t do justice to how huge these gratefuls are though. Let me share. I’m joining in with Thankful Thursday.

First, I still need to update you all on my appt with my nurse practitioner and CPN on Tuesday. It went better than I expected. The outcome is that my nurse practitioner is going to talk to the psychiatrist and see if he can find us a psychologist to do trauma therapy and work on our emotion regulation issues. I don’t remember all the details of the meeting, but at one point, I/someone in me blurted out that we’re in Facebook groups for dissociative disorders. I quickly added that really that’s none of my nurse practitioner’s business, but still we feel a lot of shame surrounding this.

Then on Tuesday evening, a discussion erupted on Twitter about the ISST-D’s guidelines for diagnosing and treating people with dissociative disorders. There’s this article from 2001 that’s still being used to weed out alleged fakers. It uses such things as being open about your DID or trauma to people other than a few close confidants, showing no obvious shame when talking about your trauma, being in support groups for DID, etc., as apparent proof that you’re fake. Now I must say I’m still conflicted about going the actual trauma/DID assessment route, but this did trigger us. However, my support staff are on my side.

We were still recovering from the shame about all this when we heard the main good news I was planning to share here. I got a higher care profile allocated to me by the long-term care funding authority. I still can’t quite believe it, but I’m so happy. The application hadn’t gone out till last week, but this afternoon, my staff got a call that it’d been approved. I’m still waiting on the letter in my government inbox confirming it, but this is really good news. I now have the highest care profile for blind people in the long-term care system.

I was feeling a bit disconnected when I heard the news. Like I said, I still can’t quite believe it, but it’s such amazing news. I’m so glad my staff were so perseverant that they actually applied for this.

Looking forward to hearing what you all are grateful for today.

Yet Another Night-Time Crisis

Posted on by Astrid

Honestly, I don’t know why I want to share this. It’s late Monday evening here and I’m feeling okay’ish. Tomorrow, I’ll have another meeting with my CPN and nurse practitioner to discuss my treatment. This got us worrying a lot last night, so much so that we ended up in crisis.

As I probably said a few weeks ago, my nurse practitioner wants me to try acceptance and commitment therapy. This wasn’t what we’d expected at all and honestly I still don’t understand how he thinks it’s a good fit for my issues. I mean, it’s evidence-based for depression, anxiety and OCD, none of which we deal with to a significant degree.

He was also pretty dismissive of my trauma-related symptoms. Obviously he doesn’t believe we’re plural. Fine by me, though not by some of the others. But somehhow he seemed not to believe I suffer with any type of trauma-related condition at all. At least, he didn’t feel that trauma treatment could or should help us.

This got us worrying last night, as we really have no idea how to advocate for ourself without coming across like a malingerer. It got so bad that we ended up impulsively leaving our room.

After our last case of elopement, the staff decided to lock the door to our home, so I couldn’t go outside. The night staff though hadn’t come to my room to check on me yet. It was 11:10PM. The night shift normally starts at 10:30. Eventually, a substitute night staff came by, saying he had to do one-on-one with another client, that the real night staff was delayed and he was really busy so could I please go back to my room? That upset us greatly, so even though we went back to our room as requested, some of us started self-harming.

About twenty minutes later, the real night staff came to check on us. We were upset, so told her to leave. She left and we cried and self-harmed some more because we were still very upset. Our signaling plan says staff are to stay with us if we’re upset even if we tell them to leave, but I don’t know whether the night staff have access to this plan.

Finally, we left our room again and waited, still panicked, for the night staff to be alerted and to come check on us. She was distraught at seeing us so upset. It makes me feel shame and guilt for making her feel this way. She got us a PRN lorazepam, which calmed us slightly. Still, we didn’t sleep till 2AM.

Now I’m feeling okay again, but I’m still not sure what to do with tomorrow’s appt. I mean, after each crisis, my mental health team say I somehow managed to get out of it. They probably mean it as a compliment, but it doesn’t feel that way. Today, I didn’t even care to call the mental health team. I’m still shifting between wanting to give up mental health treatment altogether and demanding trauma therapy. After all, the reason the appt upset me so much is that it triggered my feelings of being unseen, unheard, unsupported. Then again, maybe we’re not worth being seen, heard or supported.

We Ordered Some Beads

Posted on by Astrid

I’m feeling pretty uninspired to write today. I’m still feeling upset about last Friday’s meeting with the nurse practitioner. I mean, I don’t want to claim to have a dissociative disorder, even though on this blog I do sort of claim this. At least, we claim to be multiple. I’m not sure we fully are, but we’re definitely not fully singlet either.

We sent an E-mail to my assigned support worker explaining our issues with the nurse practitioner’s comments. She might forward it to my other staff and maybe the behavior specialist too. The behavior specialist replied to her E-mail from last Friday that I could ask my nurse practitioner why he thinks ACT is proper therapy for me and why he doesn’t want me to do EMDR. Some of us were pretty upset at her reply too.

Today we were upset at not being able to do much with respect to day activities. It rained all day, so we could only take one walk. Other than that, we sat in the living room or in my room. At the end of the day, our crafty part came up with some ideas. We might try making some bead jewelry. It doesn’t have to be professional-looking, but it could be cool.

So I ordered some beads at a store called Creadream. I originally intended on ordering glass beads, but ended up going with plastic ones. They were cheaper and the store had a larger variety of shapes. I got some round beads, some cubes, some rectangles and even some butterflies. Some of the purple ones were on a discounted price, so only like €0.66 for 25 grams (about 45 beads I think it said).

I also ordered some wire and elastic, including memory wire. This is a type of metallic wire that is shaped like a coil that fits around your arm. It can be used for making bracelets. I forgot to order pliers to cut and bend the wire with, but I or my day activities staff might be able to find some later. I also forgot to order a beading needle.

I think the littles will definitely enjoy working with all the different shapes and colors. Of course, we can’t see the colors, but we have some memory of what they look like. We ordered mostly purple ones, like I said, but also some pink, green and I can’t remember what else.

Now I constantly feel shame when I refer to the littles or write in first person plural or the like. I know I can’t fully be myself with mental health professionals, because they aren’t my friends, but why can’t I be myselves on here? My CPN knows the address to this blog and has occasionally read it, but yeah.