Monthly Archives: January 2015

To the dude from last summer and the summer before that

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We have to stop meeting this way. I am putting a stop to it, against my addictive urges.

We are not going to meet tomorrow night.

I want to see you, but I can’t.

I never told you that I’m a sex and love addict in recovery, and that I have dissociative identity disorder. Previously, I told you that I have PTSD and a severe dissociative disorder. That was my way of downplaying my DID. I know I did this because DID is most definitely unsexy. It’s so not sexy that it’s unsexy.

I rationalized getting intimate with you too soon two summers ago because I liked you. I told myself it was okay because it wasn’t casual sex as casual sex is my bottom line behavior. But then we went our separate ways, and we’ve just had false starts since then.

Out of nowhere I hear from you the same day that I learn of a loss that I’m grappling with. I can’t trust myself to go out with you when I am feeling this way. I have to sit with this loss, feel it, and not try to numb it away by being with you.

I can see myself going to bed with you, and regretting it when I don’t hear from you for another 6 months.

I am no longer interested in playing out this script. I am throwing it away. I truly hope you have a good life.

Be well,

Beatriz

a hard thing

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The day before yesterday I learned that Sara, a WordPress blogger, took her own life. I’ve been bereft since then, mainly because I feel I have no right to feel this way. For a period of time, Sara and I corresponded after she posted about her experience at Sheppard Pratt. In that particular posting she ranted in that brilliant and funny way of hers about Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). I resonated with her rant because I also find it exhausting that too many of these places that treat PTSD and DID put all their eggs in the DBT basket. DBT is not a bad concept, it certainly has its’ good points … but please it is not the be all and end all cure for PTSD. I had completed a stay at Mclean Hosptial’s residential program for traumatic and dissociative disorders, and it was interesting for both of us to hear about each other’s experiences in what many consider the top two psychiatric programs for PTSD in the country. From our correspondence you could see that we both found our programs acceptable, but way too ballyhooed for their own britches.

Sara was much more articulate than I was in ranting about it. I wish I could recall the specifics of what she wrote.

I am most disappointed in myself because I fell out of contact with her. It’s one of those things that happens when life gets in the way.

I will further admit that I became aware that Sara lived less than a 3 hour drive from me. In the back of my mind I planned to tell Sara that I lived close enough to drive to her, and I would ask if she would like to meet. But, it never came to pass. My own life struggles take center stage far too often, and that plan never got off the back burner. Now it will never be.

I sit here stuck now in front of my laptop computer, immobilized from disappointment and undeserved grief.