@JEKBreatheandBelieve I'm glad things are a little better as of your last post. Thank you for opening up this thread. As
@scout86 said, you are very brave in your willingness to do this, and it helps give me and others the courage to engage in the same conversations...it's so important to me to hear that other people experience some of the same weird things I do. So thank you.
What I want to say is going to come out all garbled I think...but I'll try anyway. My therapist is always telling me to try not to "overthink" things. I have a very hard time with this. When there are lots of "parts" warring with each other in terms of what they want and need and feel like they're supposed to do, it causes (at least for me) either total shutdown because there is no "right" answer, or the opposite...trying to do all of it...meet all my parts' expectations and everyone outside of me too. But this latter also leads to shutdown because nobody can do that for any length of time without crashing eventually (which is what happened to me a couple of years ago when the chronic pain issues started). Most of the time I don't even know what my parts' expectations are because there's so much noise inside me. At any given moment, what I want to do, must do, and should do are so mixed up I can't make any coherent sense of them (because there seems to be no unified "I") so I just randomly pick something and go with it. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. It has always made me feel completely crazy until I started to learn about dissociation this year.
In those moments when I am able to look at the "bigger picture" of my life (they're rare moments), I am rather amazed that I have managed to get by for 50 years and have accomplished what I have in spite of the inner chaos. I don't know if you ever get moments like that? Sometimes it is helpful to nudge yourself to really look at what you've built in your life (e.g., you've made a family and a career among many other accomplishments) so that you can see that even though deciding things is really hard, the trend in your life has been pretty positive. I'm discovering that many of my parts are not aware of this bigger picture. Some of the work I'm doing in therapy is trying to help them see this bigger picture so "we" can figure out how to work together for the good of the whole self. It is a long and bumpy and miserable process, and they seem to forget regularly what they have learned. Some parts don't trust other parts. Some parts hate other parts or refuse to acknowledge that they exist and are worthy. It's a mess, but it's my life.
It's also why CBT would be a big fail for me (I recently had a session with a CBT trauma therapist and I could tell a pretty humorous story about it...suffice to say, I think CBT is really helpful for some people who have a more integrated sense of self, but not so much for those of us trapped in the knotty chaos of dissociated parts).
I'll stop babbling now and just say please try to be kind and gentle with yourself as you make your way along this path of your life. There are lots of us who are walking with you.
