People With Parts: Do You Have To Schedule Time For Each?

[theshadowoftheliving]

Honestly though, being dissociated has been the "norm" my whole life, yeah? So realising when it's happening? I don't even know how I'd tell if I was space cadet a lot of the time because that is what my normal body/mind experience has always been like. How do you know that you're not seeing the colour green right now if you've been colour-blind your whole life?

This is part of my problem. I've cycled between headspaces my whole life and am just now, as I enter middle age, am realizing that most "normal" people don't live like this. So how do I even know what is or is not normal?

And how do I know which one is me? :cautious: I take it as a given that I just "know". No master plan there, just rollin with it and hoping that I've got it right. I think Me is the one that operates most of the time

I'm trying to just trust myself. It's hard. Some of the parts of me don't have very good judgement and do scary things, and I know that other parts are constantly trying to manage them. I don't know how to navigate that or who to listen to.

Parts “have scripts” and “they are by nature dissociative.” If a person is “stuck in one of those” it is because that is how his mind has chosen to cope and protect itself. I see being grounded as having more to do with regaining stability during a panic attack or flashback than aiming to be a particular alter. It isn’t a choice or decision to move all the way out of a part, to be present or to be in more.

This is really helpful, thank you. I'm trying to unlearn the therapy I went through over the winter, where my therapist constantly told me to only be one version of myself. It was really hard to hear that. The other parts felt invalidated and acted out a lot, and then we'd get in trouble in therapy for what they had done. I know that what she told me (to just suppress the other parts of me) wasn't helpful, but it was so ingrained in me that I'm having trouble getting it out of my head. I hear her sometimes, telling at me to stop dissociating and telling me that I need to act a certain way.

As I become more coconcsious, self compassionate and accepting of the needs of all the parts of my System I have come to understand that like the chocolate bar, no individual segment is the real me. Like the parts of my System, each segment and the smaller bar is a unique piece of chocolate. They share the common heritage of being part of the same original bar. Nothing added or taken away; together make up everything the original bar ever was. No segment is more significant than another and the remainder of the bar is no more significant than any of the segments. And it takes all of them to make the original Hershey bar. It has been a slow process. But like putting the segments and the smaller bar together in the wrapper and placing it on a sunny shelf, my mind is slowly healing to reform the original bar.

I also like this analogy. I'm trying to accept that all of this is me, but I think it's easier (not healthier) to disown what I don't like and pretend it doesn't exist. That's what that old therapist of mine was doing and I think I stayed with her so long because the torment was almost easier than acknowledging the intense feelings of fragmentation that define me.