Around The Bend

[Powder]

So yesterday, I started to 'unravel.' This is what I call when I feel and my spouse notices my alters pushing forward or bleeding into my personality.

I feel a lack of control, and I feel many things, including pain/body memories. I feel dissociation, numbness, like I've been drugged. I get anger bursts for no reason. I can't focus. I can't feel hunger cues, and just the list goes on and on.

While I want to validate the alter's experiences and know why they feel this way, it disrupts my present functioning at work and it's exhausting.

I figured out that PMS hormones cause me to switch, just as alcohol or drugs can do this.

I can suddenly be in a highly intuitive personality who gets a ton of information and offers it up for analysis. I can be distracted by this sudden dumping of information into my system. Then, traumatized child parts will surface, bringing their pain, painful emotional states, and anger into my main personality.

In the past, I repressed this as much as I could and was on edge and very tense and critical of those around me during PMS. I took it out on them, and my inner critic was harsh with them. I blamed.

Now, I see what is going on, and I am gentle with myself inside. I'm respectful of this integration process, though it's confusing.

I instead seek to meet these parts of my personality's needs rather than lash out in anger at the unmet needs.

Yesterday, I reached out and told my h by text what was happening to me, in candid detail. As a kid, being honest was a bad idea and earned further emotional harm.

Today, my relationship has grown ever more responsive to my needs as my hubby and I have had 21 years of practice and he sees very closely what is going on with me. Whenever I try to deny that I've switched, he can tell that it's happened, and will gently mention it when we're alone in "I feel like" kind of a way. It's not confrontational, it validates and leaves me the option of not talking about it if I'm not ready to.

 

[Powder]

What helped this time was:

1. Talked to him on phone to ground me (talk helps as I hear my adult voice speaking.) I located my fears and vociferated these. It took two goes, AM/PM to gather it up.
2. He cleaned and made food, put on the show that alter found soothing, and let me cuddle him as I wanted. *We've found that almost all the child alters' unmet need is cuddling, calm, and safety. I call this Preverbal Bonding, that is a major unmet need that will need ongoing work.
3. I pet/massage my dog, which is a vicarious form for older children who need safe touch that they can initiate. But very young inners need a warm body to rest on and listen to the heart beat or feel the warmth and safety. For this, I need my husband.
4. Permission to rest and be lazy. Young babies need a lot of rest, and I am starting to feel my inner infant more and more, which is good because that is where this healing journey began, with dreams of locating this "missing baby" that my parents rejected and who had to "go away."
5. I don't know if this is the original personality or if that's even important so much as the great difficulty of integrating and relating to unmet needs of a part of the personality so vastly different than the adult one.
6. As a mother, I can rely on my parenting skills of how I took care of my premie baby and what I did for her to keep her in a good mood and well cared for, esp. when she was hungry, tired, or had just exerted herself into a new skill or experience.
7. Littles need an island of safety to return to, and my Home/Husband/Sofa/Warm Comfort Food/Milk/Blanket are mine right now and are working for this little.

I feel much better today, and I believe it was because these needs were met along with my current ones for the basics.

Once her needs were met from a couple of hours of that restfulness, I felt she returned happy, and I was able to be myself more. I felt suddenly more interested in my usual desires for a walk and caring for my dog and kids.

I am still tired today, but feel a warm glow from the needs being met.

 

[Powder]

Thank you for the hugs, @gizmo
You seem to understand where I'm at, and this is encouraging because it means I must make some sort of sense to you. :) Yay! Feels like progress?

 

[Deleted member 12723]

@Muse I like you very much. I think you are very intelligent and bright and yes I do understand you because you are a gifted communicator and make so much sense. I am so happy that you and your husband have grown closer and that integration is happening within you.

I too have ruthless, tricky and subtle inner abusers like my parents, duh. It is so subtle that I miss out on the cues many times.

I think that you are processing in a very healthy way.

 

[Powder]

Have had two days of total fatigue. I began to collapse yesterday at 4 pm. I had to go to bed. I slept until this morning. I woke up very tired, and was all day. Focusing is very hard. Went straight to bed from work.

 

[Powder]

All week with the fatigue and depression, I felt dissociation and also new pain in my right arm and nerve pains in various places that I don't recall having had before. Since it happened along with dissociation, it's either an alter's way of feeling bleeding through, or flashbacks.

I don't differentiate between the two because at this point and not being in T. they are the same thing to my experience of PTSD with possible DID or DDNOS.

Today, I slept in 5 additional hours, not waking at 5 (10 am). I felt a lot of vague pain and fatigue upon waking. I struggled to see as I walked out for coffee. As I drank it I felt all kinds of pain everywhere that I couldn't account for, my whole body. It grew so bad I was doubled over.

Soon I was crying. I asked my h. if I took my meds, thinking maybe w/drawal? It was so bad.

He looked it up and suggested it was a BODY MEMORY. Then, the flashback washed over me big time, and I was "THERE" being tortured with electricity and in so much pain. Tears streaming, and I was shaking all over. I couldn't stop shaking and I couldn't breathe. The pain was astronomical, exploding from my head, and oozing out my nose, ears, eyes, limbs, forehead.

I felt terrified as about to die in so much pain. Why would they do this to a child?

I have no visual memory with this torture memory. Only "they." I don't know why but with the torture memories all I have is a vague "they." "They."

But I felt my dad's presence in the FB. I felt like he was just there somehow. Even after it passed and I was showering, my little girl who remembers this kept telling me to kill my dad for what he did, for his involvement. She wanted to me to go after him, to make her safe. So I must admit that she thinks he was there for this horrible torture and was part of the group of "they."

After coming back, I still feel the stiffness and pain in my head and back, but it's amazing to me how I can go from the worst pain of my life (in the FB I literally felt the most pain I in my life that I thought would literally kill me) to feeling spacey but "okay."

I feel anger. I feel confused about why the other kids that also must have been tortured by this group have not talked about it to each other, like how do you bring this up?

"Hey, so did you get electrocution tortured and gang raped at church, too?" to my old friends who went there at that time, too.

Was it only me?

 

[Powder]

Also this week, I'm feeling my baby alter who just knows that my mother doesn't want me, doesn't love me, and feels I am a burden and nothing more. It is a terrible feeling to know one is unwanted.

Terrible neglect. Hours of imprisonment in a cold, wet, hungry, scared body, alone. Unwanted. Crying.

Then, there is the little girl feeling terror and guilt for fighting the mother when she tried to drown me and my little sister. The terrible knowing that she wants us dead.

The knowing that one is so unwanted, that both parents would have us dead, would torture us, would rape, would drown us. Why was I born to them? Why would this happen to a child? Was I so bad?

 

[Powder]

Shaking so hard trying to type this.

I don't know what to say to the little girl inside me who survived this. Honey, I don't have words for you. I can't believe what you went through. I can't believe how strong you are to have survived this!

I don't know how to assure you that you're safe after remembering this because it is SO BAD that I am in shock myself experiencing it right along with you in flashbacks. The amount of pain that you were in...The fear you felt...The abandonment by your parents...No safe place anywhere...

I want to make a safe place for you here. You are safe now with me, safe to remember and tell your story. I won't disbelieve. I know you are right.

I just can't do what you ask and kill those who did this to you like you want me to because that would be wrong, legally, and wouldn't make what happened to you/me go away.

 

[Powder]

I just realized that I was told by a 5-6 year old alter that she was afraid to go the bathroom at home and had to hold it.

But then, with my torture flashbacks, I finally got that she felt that way because the torture happened when I was taken by the group from the bathroom.

That alter felt that if she had just "held it" longer then those bad guys wouldn't have abducted her and tortured her.

Later alters were not aware of why they had to hold it, and this continues to affect me. I am having difficulty integrating. I should go to therapy for this but am distrustful and now see why. Group/ritual abuse. They have people hidden in the public and I am afraid of who I may be talking to. Paranoid. Can't trust people to not take advantage of the programming done on me; if they are highly intelligent they can "hack me" is a fear.

 

[Powder]

Figured out that the colors in the room were part of the ritual abuse. Did not know that colors were used deliberately and why I associate the colors with the flashbacks from the ritual abuse but not the CSA at home.

The dreams and the colors in those that I still don't understand and how they relate to emotions evoked by the still unremembered traumas. :(

 

[Deleted member 12723]

@Muse I too know the feeling that I was not wanted and hated by both of my parents so you are not alone. You survived such horrror and terror. I think that you are an incredibly strong person. Hang in there you will not always feel the way you do now.:hug:

 

[Powder]

Thanks, Gizmo. I'm feeling pretty depressed. It's hanging on.

I can't be sure, but I think it has to do with the most recent and physically painful FB's. I have read that being in physical pain causes depression.

However, I have been tapering off meds, and it could be the w/drawal.