Tag Archives: Dissociative identity disorder

Belle and the singing bowl

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A Japanese rin marks the beginning of moments ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For days I’ve wanted and not wanted to write. The words and sentences were swirling around in my head, but I could not bring myself to take out my laptop. I feared that writing those sentences would propel me closer to the depths of blackness. My selves were vacillating between wanting an end, and not wanting an end. When I’m in a situation such as this the best thing to do is nothing, and that is what I did. I simply fell asleep in a dissociative state around 7 pm.

We saw Doc yesterday, and discovered a new self. Honestly, for some reason, I don’t care for the term “alter.” Since Doc says they are all a part of me, I shall call them selves because I can. I was late for the appointment because I got lost on the way. There is no good reason for this as I’ve been there many times.

Sure enough, Doc figured out that someone else was taking over, and out tumbled, Secret. Secret is young, though I can’t figure out her exact age at the moment. She is terrified of highways and heavy traffic. Apparently, this appears to be the reason I have so much trouble getting to his office on time, or losing my way there at times. She recalled instances of horrifying car rides with my stepfather. Even now, I feel myself slipping away because I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember the feeling of impending death from his careless and thoughtless acts behind a wheel. He loved to scare us in the car.

It seemed like Secret was around for the scary car situations, but Belle would appear when the horror turned to feelings of death. Belle holds the worst of the feelings, the feelings of wanting the pain of existence in that household to end. Belle, for the most part, just knows despair, no hope, and a desire for an end. Doc’s theory is that Belle exists just for that, to hold the worst of the despair for all the others.

As Secret started to recall the scary car experiences to Doc, Belle appeared when it became too much for Secret. Belle has this defeated sounding voice that breaks my heart. As she tells Doc that she wants to die, he comes and sits right in front of us. We are almost toe to toe. He starts to ask her to think about what it must be like for a psychiatrist to lose a patient to suicide, knowing that his patient gave up on life. He also told Belle that we don’t know what it’s like “on the other side” so stay here, and keep trying.

He then went over to his desk, and picked up a singing bowl, of which I had never seen in my life. He touched it on the side with wooden mallet, and it let out this peaceful sound that I can’t even describe. Belle asked if she could play it herself, and he allowed her to do so. Then as quickly as she felt the joy of the sound of the singing bowl, she found herself feeling like throwing up. Apparently, the good feeling was so new, and so foreign that she nearly became sick.

We were then in and out of a dissociative state for the next 12 hours. We have now come out the other end and survived, but we are tired.

As I said before, I am a bad friend …

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It has taken me five days to compose this post. That’s how hard it’s been to write about this.

In a previous post I recounted the ways in which I am a bad friend. Well, I had a revealing conversation today that gave more evidence of that. A friend of mine asked me how my Memorial Day weekend was, and she could tell it was not a good weekend for me. I told her that it was a hard weekend because I found myself recounting previous Memorial Days when she and I were closer, and I missed it. I then went on tell her that I felt she and the rest of the group of friends abandoned me when I really needed them.

She then shocked me by telling me that was not the case, that she, in fact, called me frequently during the time after I had my traumatic incident. She then went into detail about lengthy conversations we had on the phone, and I recall none of it. She has no reason to lie to me, and she gave too many details for it to be a lie. Plus, it’s not like her to tell anything but the truth.

And in that vein, of always telling the truth, while I was still grappling with the fact that she did, in fact, keep in contact with me, she called out the elephant in the room. She said to me, ” You never visited after my son was born. You only held him once. You disappeared as soon as my son was born, and I never understood why that happened.”

So there it was, just like that, she called it out. After nearly 5 years of walking around the elephant one of us finally called it out. I decided to go with it, and tell her after all this time why I did what I did.

Nearly five years ago I hit rock bottom. I was drinking and carelessly putting myself in unsafe situations. This behavior culminated in a sexual assault from someone I knew, and that person held a job in high esteem. My friend says that I she and I had long conversations about this attack where she implored me to report it. I do not recall these conversations, but the fact the she knew so many details indicates that we did have these conversations. I can only attribute my memory loss to my DID.

Shortly after my assault my friend adopted a newborn baby. My hitting rock bottom and crawling into the rooms nearly dovetailed with the arrival of her son. And I couldn’t deal, couldn’t and wouldn’t go see the baby. All of a sudden I had an aversion to her baby. It flummoxed me because I love babies. But I could not come near this baby without getting twitchy and freaked out.

The baby was not at fault for my body’s reactions. My friend was not at fault for my body’s reactions. Although I knew that, I was powerless to change my reactions. I could not function around this poor child, and found myself avoiding going to her house to see him. I avoided this new lovely child because of the reaction my body had around this precious being. But the fallout was my friendship with this person whom I cherished. That friendship took a very bad hit, and then, eventually, the friendship was no longer alive. There were no words exchanged about it, it just became a long goodbye.

Now it is all out in the open, and the realization of the impact of my conditions on friendships has hit me hard. I have a better understanding as to why I’m largely alone. It’s hard to swallow, but it makes sense.

Whoa to you, Mr. Lame Date

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I really liked Mr. Lame Date. Of course, I did not know he was a lame date at the moment I became smitten with him. I won’t even call him a boyfriend because it was so short-lived. But it was passionate and, like many relationships in the early stage, full of promise. We had a lot in common, he made me laugh, and those boy-next-door looks of his did not hurt.

Inevitably, once you get past the fun pleasantries at the initial stages you have to start sharing the some of the real-life less than ideal crap that we have floating around in our lives. My floatie is my PTSD and Dissociative Identity Disorder. His is his ex-wife that has schizo-affective disorder.

After becoming close in a relatively short period of time he texted me today, yes, you read that right, he TEXTED me to say that he needs to “apply the brakes.” He finds me intelligent and “awfully interesting” (such an odd phrase), but he’s not ready to deal with someone who has similar issues to his ex-wife. Well, I didn’t know that PTSD and DID were similar to schizo-affective disorder!

It is sad to me that he’s made a broad generalization about my mental illness without knowing a whole lot about it. But, for me, the worst part is that I had him over to my apartment. I let very few people into my apartment, but I let him in because I really liked him.

So, Mr. Lame Date, to sum it up, you’re a first-class jerk. You knew I rarely let people into my apartment, but you persuaded me to have you over, and I allowed it. I allowed myself to get close to you, and incorrectly assessed you as one of the “good guys.” I was wrong. And perhaps most importantly, I regret giving you 4 of my freshly baked chocolate peanut butter cookies. You are so not worthy of such fine baking. Procurement of fine baked goods under false pretenses will inevitably backfire into bad karma.