Altercations with alters

Ugh! Fuck.

...gathers self...

I mean, 'Hello World.' You may have noticed I am feeling a little bit peeved just at this moment. That is mainly due to two things, one being that I went back to work today. Did I tell you about the email I sent my manager on my last day before Christmas? I can't recall if I did, but it was basically explaining that the 'little extra work session' she had given me to do each week is turning out to be much more than that and that I don't have the time to do all of my other work. Well today I found a courteous email from her saying that we would need to discuss my workload and that she had looked at it previously and felt that I didn't have too much on! (Fucking ba&"*&d c$^"!!!!... ....gathers self again....). Now I am fucking shitting myself because I will have to defend myself face to face and confrontation makes me crumble like a fucking digestive biscuit. OK don't panic people... breathe... be logical. There's only one thing for it: I will have to prepare my case. Enough thinking about it for now though.
 
The second thing that has gotten on my goat is fucking SHAN (alter). She doesn't bother me much. She doesn't engage with me much. For the most part she doesn't come out much. She has a relationship with the world and Adam but not so much with 'us'. I am generally happy not to think about her or engage with her too. Not that I don't appreciate the role she has in our life, but I just don't feel the need to be best buds with her. But I can't help but feel she is responsible for T's Christmas card going missing before we got to give it to her.

For some reason, this year Shan decided to write her own card to give to T. Don't ask me why because as far as we're aware she has never really communicated with her in the sessions but meh. Candy did feel a bit embarrassed about the fact that Shan felt the need to write T a separate card whenever we had planned on sending a card from Candycan that would surely do as an all rounder. So anyway, we had the card from 'us' and the card from Shan and a letter from Pan which was really special. We really liked what Pan had said in it and it held an explanation about a picture that Pan and Little C had done for T with some assistance from Candy.

So the last thing I remember is it being the night before we were due to see her before Christmas. I had the card from 'us' and I was putting the letter and the card from Shan inside the envelope of the card from us. At this point Shan told Candy she shouldn't be so fucking arrogant and pompous to think that Shan was just an alter and Candy was the 'main person'. She didn't want Candy to put her card inside the other one and said that she had every right to give it to T herself and was not a sub part. Candy kind of ignored her and kept putting it in, thinking that it was fucking embarrassing anyway that we even had to give the fucking card to T... and that's the last I remember about it. I can't for the life of me remember what I did with it after that and I haven't seen it since. I felt sure it would turn up but this was now (erm hold on, I've lost count of what day it is...) over a week ago and I have looked everywhere I can think of, several times. I am coming to the conclusion that Shan has done something with it and not told me to spite us all. She's so stubborn! Ugh!

T said that if it turned up it would be OK to drop it into her tomorrow, which I think may be her last day. But it hasn't turned up and it doesn't look like it is going to. I just hope it hasn't gotten into someone else's hands cos that would be really embarrassing. It's embarrassing enough showing these parts of myself to T, even through written communication. I would not like for someone else to be reading things written by us. I'll get over it. I'm sure it's no loss to T, it's more Pan's letter that I am annoyed about. Shan, if it was you, why and where the fuck have you put it?!

So anyway, those are the two annoying things. Sorry for the swearing; although my apology is probably a bit late because anyone who is offended by the F word  will likely have stopped reading long ago. Sometimes it just needs to be used though I'm afraid.

My final thought for the day (I'm aware that I still haven't told you anything about Christmas and there are a few other things I need to talk about too but they will have to wait for another day) is that whilst combing through every scrap of paper and diary I own this evening (again) looking for the cursed card, I noticed that I didn't keep any kind of written record of the time between my old psychologist leaving at the end of 2008 and my starting with T or the weeks surrounding that time. From memory, I know it was really, really hard and I was not coping well or functioning on any real level, but I didn't write a thing down about it. This has always been my way. I've kept diaries on and off from the age of eleven and when I've looked back to search for words written about my pain years ago, I find pages and pages of writing about stuff but very few mentions of the real pain and the real hurt in my life. I have tended to shut down from those things and not record them. There is very little talk of my father in any of my diaries, even though he has been probably the biggest cause of why I am so fucked up now. The first psychologist leaving was really hard and I did the same thing obviously. I went into myself and didn't express how it was on paper because I didn't want to have any reminders set down on paper for the future, I guess.

So, presumably, one day I will look back at the end of 2011 and wonder how it was for me then when T left. I will want to find some words of expression about how I reacted and what I was feeling, so I will try hard not to hide from blogging. Although at the very moment I say this to you I am aware that while I was combing through the papers earlier, I was piling them up and putting them inside a plastic folder and shutting it and someone inside me was saying "good bye everyone, I'm locking you in here until T comes back." So I guess I need to think this through and make a decision. Am I going to face how things feel and try my hardest to express them and even to feel them, or am I going to let a shut down happen and switch myself into function mode? Part of me is tempted to not go to see the new psychologist next week and just see what happens if I try to pretend I am not someone with mental health problems for a few months.

I also went to the doctors today and asked about medication. She invariably has tried to convince me to take it every time I have seen her and I've usually declined, but now I am seriously thinking it's time I stop being a fucking naive ostrich and realise that I'm not doing too well on my own. She spent half an hour talking through the different types of tablets and wrote me a list of names of types. She said I should research them myself and let her know what I thought. They are: SSRIs (which I took before and she said we would probably avoid because they made my already barely existent libido, non existent altogether), venlafaxine, duloxetine and mirtazepine (she seemed to think this mirtazepine one might help with my sleeping problems a bit). She also talked about tricyclic antidepressants and said that these were too sedating and not beneficial enough to warrant that effect so she wouldn't recommend these. She also questioned whether my problems with libido were due to being on an antidepressant or other factors and I felt my head whooshing and she started to look a bit blotchy but I managed to get out that I knew it was to do with other things but that the SSRIs had made it worse.

She strikes me as the kind of lady who thinks that we should all just look on the bright side and that things are never that bad and maybe you're just being a bit over dramatic and you can't be that sick cos you go to work etc. That's great for her. I think that's a good ethos... I doubt she would be saying that if she saw what is going on in my head and perhaps got a few snapshots of me at various moments throughout any given week when I'm not going to work or sitting in her office looking like a half normal person. Or perhaps if she had some of the flashbacks and nightmares, she might feel a bit less motivated to look on the bright side. Not that I would want to burst her bubble, and besides, my hope rests in the knowledge that people like her exist: people who don't know what it's like to feel like your innocence and joy and peace and ability to trust were taken from you before you even knew the meaning of those words. I rely on people who see the good in life, because she help me to think that perhaps there is good in life and there is a way to wake up in the morning and feel like you are embracing being alive in this world.

So that's all for today. I am still feeling surprisingly OK. But then, I am still knowing that T is at work, I get  a lot of reassurance from that. How will I feel come next week when I am sitting in the waiting room outside of her office waiting to meet new psychologist and T is not there?

Alters fighting with each other: sabotage and rescue

I'm still alive! It's been almost two weeks since I last blogged and I'm sorry about that (for myself too), but things have been hectic to say the least. First of all, here is a post I half wrote last week but didn't get finishing:

"Things are different. I'm losing time a lot. Just small amounts. I think it's mainly just moments where I am going somewhere else in my head and then realising time has gone by. It's because I'm stressed. 

I have another work 'event' this Thursday which I am organising. My colleague who is supposed to be helping me has offered to do a twenty minute session of the entire half day and no help whatsoever with the organising. So I have had to do all of the practical things like venue, food, invitations etc plus research the entire topic, come up with a seminar on the topic and design all of the displays and demos and group work, plus do all of the printing, getting resources, confirming attendees etc. I actually think it would be better if she wasn't helping at all because at least then I could take the credit for the hard work. She does this every time: offers to help and then does a tiny amount but it is so that she can say she organised it with me and that will be recorded on her work record as something she has done. 

She's more than happy to give her ideas about what I should be doing in my parts though and she's really quick to tell me I should be doing things differently. Most of the time, it's just that my different way is only that... different. Not wrong; just not how she would do it. I have been working every minute that I have been awake, more or less ('more' because I seem to spend the night dreaming about work as well and actually found on more than one occasion that I solved a few work related problems in my sleep... 'less' because sometimes DID just makes the focus impossible and I have been doing a good job at procrastinating at times) and need to probably stay awake and work every second between now and Thursday if I want to have it all organised.

Anyway I didn't come here to complain about work. I've been dying of the cold the past several days which is like the cherry on the icing on the cake at the moment. It really hasn't helped things. The good news is, if I survive until Thursday, I am going to be off work for SIX WHOLE DAYS afterwards! Yippee! This will be the first proper time off I've had since my trip in the new year and it is long overdue. Seriously overdue. I have found myself taking an annual leave day several times in the past few months just to lie in bed and get my head around psychology sessions, or because I have been unable to function. I don't want to wither away all of my holidays on crisis situations. 

Hopefully having a proper break will get me rested and psychologically improved so that I will be better able to cope with my work/therapy/physical health/life juggling act. And maybe after that I might even be able to start looking forward to Christmas. Christmas is 'my' time. A lot of people with mental health problems find (and understandably so) Christmas to be the hardest time of year. For me it's always been my favourite time of year. I'm the annoying person who doesn't go along with the rant about the decorations being up in the shops straight after Halloween. I'm the one who says thinks 'the earlier the better'. 

I'm not sure why I love Christmas so much. I have split memories about it. I would say it was the time of year my parents were more likely to make an effort to make us happy as a family, so we had some nice times at Christmas. Yet at the same time, I remember that my dad hated Christmas and on more than one year banned us from having a tree up or any decorations. So maybe my over embracing attitude about Christmas is a rebellion from my scrooge of a dad, or maybe it's just..."

That ended quite abruptly and I don't know what wisdom I was about to impart but I'm guessing it was possibly saying that my love of Christmas could be to do with the fact that sometimes Christmas was a happy time for us. I never liked to admit it to myself at the time, but Christmas was always the one time of year where my church (cult) didn't meet and I always kind of enjoyed not having to go to the meetings, which were usually at least twice per week and not just for a few hours but the whole of my Sundays.

The sad thing about this year is that, despite my usual love of Christmas, I have not been able to really feel any excitement about it. If I'm honest, I have been quite depressed recently. However, I have been quite depressed on previous years and this hasn't stopped me from appreciating the Christmassyness. This year I have found myself dreading it a little bit, mainly because of my lack of energy and physical tiredness. This could be largely due to my new diagnosis of a genetic disorder, so I am hoping that once I start my treatment for it, my energy levels will improve. I have been trying to do some Christmas shopping online, because my energy for actual shopping is quite low, but you kind of miss out on the 'festiveness' of it all.



I was reflecting on this with Adam after Thursday's event and observed that I think I do this on purpose. Let me explain this in easier terms: in the plural. Basically, there is a part that tries to sabotage me. They intentionally cause me to not do the work I should be doing. They want me to fail or for things to end in disaster. There were a lot of times I knew I should be getting organised but would intentionally do other things instead. I feel that this part wants things to go wrong. It wants drama and bad things to happen (is it because that's what's familiar to that part?). Then there is the rescuing part: the one who stays up until 2am getting everything done. They come in and take over when it's getting to that disaster point. Why does this happen? Part of me only knows chaos and drama in their life and can't cope with things being good and straight forward, so they try to recreate that on a daily basis. The other part wants for a better, straight forward life and strives to achieve that. The two parts are at war with each other. It makes for a lot of stress.

In my clinical psychology session this week, T and I got to talking about my relationship with Adam and her reflections ran along a similar vein. We noted that there is a part of me that tries to sabotage my relationship with him and drive him away or make him angry. I asked her why someone would do this or to be precise, I think I said something like: "Why? Why?! I don't get it! WHY?! Why would someone live with something they hate all their life and then try to recreate it? Why?!".

I think my seldom seen passion in my question must have warranted an actual answer for once (don't psychologists have some kind of policy of never answering a question?) because she explained that it is what that part knows, therefore it has the coping strategies to deal with someone being horrible. It hasn't developed the coping strategies to deal with a male being nice and so this feels uncomfortable. She then said, that there is a part who does match with the good things too, because I got into a relationship with Adam in the first place. I agreed that there is a part of me that's really good at picking out the things that would make for a good life: I have found a lovely guy to live with, I have worked hard despite my setbacks and made a good life for myself. I've gone into an area of work that helps people to include practical things in their lives that were often missing from my own as a child; yet the other part is still there because I can help other people to improve this but I still don't do it myself... and there is always that voice saying I don't deserve that for myself.

I said that statistically, people like me don't end up with people like Adam. Statistically, people like me are more likely to end up with abusive partners. T felt that the part that is able to feel a match with 'good' things is there because I must have had some relationship as a child that provided this. She says there must have been someone who showed me love and kindness in a safe way. She has said this to me before. It suggests she is working on a theory that you can't know what love is unless you've experienced it. You can't know a good thing unless you've seen a good thing. It's hard for me to pinpoint one person who was that influence. I think it must have been my mother. But even she, although loving and kind and caring to me, was at times abusive and scary and unsafe. Could I have developed those skills based on how she was in the good times? Did I develop a self who saw and related to only the good side of my mum and another part to deal with the other side of her along with my father? Is that why there would be a part who could know good things and trust them despite not having a consistent source of that from one person? It must be; otherwise, if we're basing this belief on the aforementioned theory, I couldn't have the part who knows what a good relationship would be like. I hope you can get your head around my wording of this. I don't know that I've explained it very well.

It has given me things to think about anyway. It brings up one big question for me: how can I change so that I don't continue to try to sabotage every good thing in my life? How can I change my desire for life to be chaotic and painful and lonely? I feel that part won't be content until they have driven Adam away (they have already managed to make sure I have no other relationships worth talking about by cutting us off from people) and caused me to lose my job. And like T says, there are no winners in this situation. That part won't be happy then either. I wonder if that part actually wants to drive everyone away so that they can justify suicide, being that my only real reason for not having done it is the knowledge of how it affects those left behind.

Phwew... getting a bit heavy there. I don't want to end on that sad note so despite this post being of a length that makes up for all of the posts I normally would have done in two weeks combined, I will finish on a better note by saying that I am so relieved that 'Thursday' is over and I am now in the middle of my lovely break from work. Adam and I are away on our jollies for a few days. Nowhere exotic, just a lovely hotel in Fermanagh and I am enjoying not thinking about work at all. I have decided that I am not going to feel guilty about anything if I can help it for the next few days, which is a good thing because the food here is to die for.

It's currently 1pm in the afternoon and after having a mammoth cooked breakfast this morning, I am sitting in bed typing this while Adam is sleeping in the other bed (our bed at home is Super King Sized and downgrading to sharing a double bed for this weekend wasn't working out so I have ended up in the extra single bed, but between you and me, I'd be happy if I had my own bed on a permanent basis!) after coming down with some kind of bug and cold combination (probably wouldn't want to be sharing a bed with someone in that condition anyway). I feel sorry for him that he is sick but I hope it will pass. Is it bad that I also feel secretly relieved that he may be too ill to want to have sex with me too? It has been on my mind, that going away for a romantic break means there's a kind of expectation for that intimacy too. I have struggled from day one with sex with Adam and it's not getting any easier with time. Damnit! I didn't want to end on a negative note and it has gone down hill again... OK something positive.... the good news is it's Monday and I'm not at work and it's raining outside and I don't need to be out in it and for the next few days there's not a thing in the world I have to do if I don't want to. I might go and sit in the jacuzzi later... this is the life!