Thank you
@sun seeker and
@shimmerz . I can't begin to tell you how helpful it is to feel your presence with me. When things are so dark, I feel very alone with all this and I forget so easily the kind people like you who are there.
I got up, finally after several hours of in-and-out sleep, at 4:30 AM. Still in a pretty dark place but damned determined to break out. So yesterday I had this idea that instead of working with my parts cards I would do something else. I had a little hissy fit in my session with Yoda and started crunching up the parts cards but he asked me please not to do that. But it feels like a stupid waste of time. It was my idea anyway, and it was a sucky one. I don't like working with those cards. So I ended up leaving the box outside of his door because I knew I would destroy them. So I'm free of the damned things until friday at least.
Anyway, the new idea was to take strips of index cards and write a word or phrase on each one (index cards have been a bit of a salvation for me in the past year or two). The idea is to maybe get all these fragmented bits of memory that have been cascading (when it is calmer) and barraging (when it is more intense). So I cut up a whole pile of them this morning. I told Yoda about the idea and his advice was to keep it simple. And I laughed because it is truly impossible for me to keep anything simple. Everything I see, or hear, or feel or smell, or taste, or think is tangled up with so many other things. Nothing, literally nothing in my life is simple. This is a big part of the problem and why I live in a perpetual state of overwhelm.
I get that it is because what for some people might be simple is not for people like me because I am experiencing it through multiple, competing, and polarized perspectives. It is utterly exhausting.
So what I did was just start writing the names of places and people from a period in my life that has been haunting me. Just one person, and one place per card. Some of them are really specific (like there are several "places" in my 2nd growing up house that link with multiple memories). I ended up with a sizeable pile of cards. And it was a pretty interesting exercise.
I learned that when I wrote the names of outside places, like "the climbing tree," I was pretty calm. But as soon as I started writing places at school, or at my house, or even some outside places that involved other people, I got pretty activated. But I was able to put the brakes on the activation so that it did not link up to any memory at all except for the place. Same thing with the people. Just the words on the card.
The idea was/is to get all the chaos out of the inside of me and onto the cards. That maybe eventually I can link these cards to the traumatized parts of me. That maybe eventually I can create some order out of the chaos of memories that assault me. That maybe those parts will talk to me in a way that I can understand what they're saying...in a way I can figure out what the trouble was/is for them.
It worked a bit. I was feeling wobbly inside and a bit dizzy and disoriented. Had to keep looking up and around the cottage and reminding myself where I am now. It's hours later and 1/2 an ativan later, and I'm still feeling like this. But somebody "talked" to me when I was in the shower. And after, I was able to write down not only what that part said but also this blast through of the suicidal part and it's concerns and why it is hounding me. I kind of begin to see how this IFS therapy stuff works. Because when I heard what that part was scared about and what part it was trying to protect, I had a very different sense of it. I didn't hate it so much. And I was able to reassure it that we could keep trying for just a little longer. That it is not time to give up yet. That killing the body would be the ultimate failure, and failure and humiliation are big pieces of what that part is trying to protect me from by killing me. It's a pretty rigid part with pretty limited comprehension of the subtleties of life.
And that's all I'm going to do today. Because if I start going down any of those paths that opened up, I know I am inviting trouble, and with the way I am feeling now, that would not be good. So all those cards are going into a box which I will imagine is a giant steel vault with many padlocks on the front. Yoda says I need to create places where the parts can see me even when they are contained, but I can't do that today. Because if they can see me, I can see them. And I don't want to see them.
So, I am going to do my bounce chair, walk my doggie in the marshes, and have lunch with someone I've met here on the forum. Then when I come home, I will meditate, rest. Then I will solve the friggin' problem that is preventing my progress on my website, and I will flesh out the concept for my book. Then, because I finally untangled the ball of yard, I will start knitting the hat my daughter wants. Then I will drive her, the dog, and me back to my real house tonight and have dinner with my husband (who I haven't seen for nearly a month) and the friend who is staying at our house. Tomorrow is filled with doc appointments for my daughter, and my appointment with Wag. This last ought to be interesting--she is supposedly going to give me some literature to read about "what is going on with me." She has never used the words Dissociative Identity Disorder. Maybe was waiting for Yoda to talk to me about it first. It should be interesting.
