Dissociation is a super power

Feb 16, 2014Feb 14, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 11 Comments

“Please tell me there is an bright side to dissociation“. Someone found my blog the other day by searching for this phrase. It makes me ache with frustration and sadness!

Of course there is a bright side! There are so, so many bright sides. They get lost when we talk about illness, disability, deficits. When we share the ‘once it was helpful but now it’s a problem’ story. When we collapse a whole life into a single, painful narrative of difference and limitations. Dissociation can be horrific and devastating and I don’t make light of it or of the suffering people experience. But this isn’t the whole story! Let’s start talking about bright sides, shall we?

Not all dissociation is pathological

Dissociation has been broadly defined. This means a LOT of highly valuable, important skills are being included in the category. Some level of capacity to dissociate, when it is broadly defined like this, is actually essential in our ability to function. Disconnecting from things is helpful in our ability to focus. People who struggle to damp down any of their sensory input are overwhelmed and highly distracted by it. Being able to put aside most of the input (the sound of a fly buzzing, the prickly feeling of rough socks, the worry about your friend who isn’t talking to you, the slightly sick feeling after drinking too much water) to focus on something important, like an exam, is very helpful!

People who are struggling with severe and chronic dissociation, the kind that leaves you numb, confused, lost, unable to feel, taste, touch, smell, or remember the faces of the people you love, often think of these kinds of dissociation as existing on the other side of a continuum of health. That once they’ve got the ‘bad’ dissociation under control, and they’re back to ‘normal’, maybe then they will get to experience some of the good kinds.

I disagree. Those of us who are drowning in the kinds of dissociation that takes away instead of enhances our lives are closer to the useful kinds of dissociation than many regular people. We are well versed in it, we are used to it, we have a huge aptitude for it, and often we are only drowning in it now because we once stumbled across it as something incredibly helpful. Do we need skills other than dissociation to navigate life? Certainly! Does depending on dissociation exclusively leave us uneven and struggling? Of course. But, sometimes when I’m talking to people who are absolutely overwhelmed by intense dissociation, I talk about dissociation as a super power. Sometimes working on reducing it through grounding techniques and trigger management just isn’t working. Sometimes the first step is to learn how to live with it better, how to use it to your advantage, how to stop hating it and feeling destroyed by it. Sometimes we need to become better at being dissociative, rather than less dissociative.

We are so used to this idea that dissociation is bad. We are so used to this idea that our minds are damaged and broken, and that we need expert intervention to help us be more normal and functioning. Dissociation can be a terrible thing. But it can also be a gift.

Dissociation can be learning self hypnosis to turn off your experience of pain during a dental visit.
Dissociation can be letting go of the bad memories for awhile so you can have new experiences.
Dissociation can be the ability to attend uni and study despite homelessness and self harm and carer responsibilities and your dog dying.
Dissociation can be discovering that you have a part who has not experienced any of the loss or heartache, a part who loves like their heart has never been broken, who hopes and dreams and cares and helps to lead your whole system to better places.
Dissociation can be sobbing into the night, overwhelmed with grief at the loss of your child, and still being able to get up the next day to hug and cook breakfast for your other child.
Dissociation can be disconnecting from the panic and terror and the overwhelming smell of blood to be able to help out at the car accident.
Dissociation can be laying in her arms and touching her face and feeling the minutes stretch out to whole days, to years that you’ve lain here like this, alone together with no world intruding.
Dissociation can be not noticing you haven’t eaten all day because the book you’re reading is absolutely brilliant and captivating and you can see all the characters in your mind and hear them talking to each other and at night you dream about them.
Dissociation can be walking away from every cruel and unkind thing ever said about you and finding new ways to think about yourself.
Dissociation can be having other parts to ask for help, not being alone anymore through any of the hard things.
Dissociation can be a four year old inside singing you to sleep when you’re lying awake worrying about the world.
Dissociation can be going numb when you’re feeling suicidal.
Dissociation can be reliving the most wonderful, exciting, hopeful, inspiring moments of your life as if they happened this morning.
Dissociation can be smelling a perfume and vividly remembering your Grandma’s garden and the feel of her hugs.
Dissociation can be having a conversation on the phone with a sick friend, getting the lunch boxes packed, finding your shoes, filling up the cat food bowl, helping knot a tie, and getting out of the house on time to catch the bus.
Dissociation can be the way, for just a moment, while you’re swimming, or drawing, or listening to your favourite music, or watching him play, everything in the whole world is okay.
The ability to compartmentalise is what helps us to do our best in a situation. For a doctor to concentrate on a patients needs even though their marriage is rocky and they’re stressed and anxious about it.
Dissociation can be part of the experience of artists who lose time when they paint, and athletes who forget they are tired when they’re running, and happy nerds who don’t notice someone calling their name when they’re lost in a good book.
Dissociation can be about mindfulness. The ability to be captured by the movement of the breeze in the lavender bush, to taste every drop of beer and be immersed in the smell and laughter of other humans.

You can learn how to use your dissociation. If you can turn it on, you can turn it off again. You can learn how to trigger it, how to use anchors, how to dial it up and down, how to go with the flow. When to trust it, when to shape it, when to learn other skills. We have so much to learn! Something that can help you put aside overwhelming feelings, or not feel physical pain is simply amazing! We have this idea that you have to lose all of those things in order to be well, in order to not be overwhelmed by dissociation in a way that steals life. Maybe this is true for some of us. But I’d caution making that assumption for everyone. And if you’re stuck (at least for now) with some of the downsides of being highly dissociative, why not at least explore the upsides? Maybe we don’t overcome everything by fighting it.

There’s balances. My experience has been that using dissociation as a blunt instrument for every purpose has great costs. Choosing not to feel all the painful feelings often costs you all the wonderful ones as well. Containment often works better than suppression. Being guided by your own needs rather than imposing a schedule or ideas from outside. But if I told you that some people can choose not to feel pain when they’re injured, not to remember awful memories when they are busy getting out of that life, that some people still watch movies like little kids do, where the characters are real and make them cry, that some people find that doing their favourite thing in the world makes time stretch into something approaching infinity… you wouldn’t tell me these people are sick, you’d say they have super powers.

When Multiplicity doesn’t protect us

Jan 27, 2014Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

For most of us who come to multiplicity by way of trauma such as abuse, neglect, bullying, or chronic pain, we’re familiar with the idea of multiplicity as a creative defence mechanism, something that helped us to survive. This can be a powerful re-framing of the idea of multiplicity as an illness, and very helpful! For some people it’s not all of the story. In some ways, multiplicity can make you more vulnerable to harm.

Many of us with multiplicity start out with no idea that we have parts, either we lose time due to amnesia, or experience the world through the hazy confusion of co consciousness. For many of us, the dissociation is highly functional, breaking up information and containing it in ways that help us to manage life, and allowing us to adapt simultaneously to a variety of different environments with very different social requirements. We have found a way of growing and navigating life that works for us, even if we are completely oblivious to it.

I’ve been talking lately about how powerful triggers and anchors can be for people with parts, but it needs to be said that they can also be abused. Even when the multiplicity is hidden or unknown, sometimes abusive people figure out by accident or instinct that certain things will keep a compliant part out, or trigger a part who discredits themselves to other people. They may not interprete these things using a ‘multiple’ framework and language, but they stumble across triggers and anchors and use them to their own ends. It’s worth mentioning that these factors are at play for people who don’t have parts too, in that all people are vulnerable to things like finding they are more submissive in certain settings, or more likely to act out when treated certain ways. But it can be devastating when dissociative barriers prevent a person from being able to access memories or skill sets to help them protect themselves. This can be the catastrophic downside to multiplicity as a protective mechanism.

Sometimes harm is done with no intent to harm. Triggers may be avoided or used unintentionally by family or friends who tell a person with parts that ‘You’re not yourself today’ when they switch to a part their family doesn’t get along with. Sometimes others may learn to fear certain triggers such as what happens when the person gets drunk, or listens to certain music, and switches to a part who’s disoriented or aggressive. People with parts can find themselves under a constant subtle pressure to keep out the parts other people like, get along with, or find easy to manage. Other parts can spend many years trapped inside and be frozen at certain stages of development, never getting the chance to hone crucial social skills, tell their stories, use their talents, or connect empathically with other people. This can leave systems extremely uneven in their ability to function and their experience and expectations of the world. Systems can easily become polarised into the compliant parts and rebellious parts. Sometimes therapy can also play into this dynamic where the parts that the therapist relates to or finds easiest to get along with get to have key roles, while other parts are excluded, supressed, ‘fused’, ‘integrated’, put into lockdown, or convinced they are no longer needed and have no further role to play in life. (that’s not to suggest that these approaches are never useful or necessary)

Self awareness can make a huge difference for people with parts. Understanding that you have parts can be tremendously helpful in buffering the issues that multiples in a non-multiple world can have. Whether it’s someone saying that they like this artwork/outfit/meal better than that one – and inadvertently hurting the feelings of the part who worked on the less well received item, the frustration of losing skills and abilities as parts surface and go away again, or simply the phenomenal daily challenges posed by differences between parts as large as gender or sexual orientation, or as seemingly small as the part who does the grocery shopping love oranges and yoghurt and never buys any bread even though the rest of the parts love toast for breakfast and never eat oranges. Knowing why you have conversations in your head, 4 different opinions about almost everything, why you can be feeling happy, sad, bored, and curious all at the same time, or for that matter, hot, cold, scared, and sleepy… can help make a lot of sense of what has just been one more bizarre and confusing experience.

However, awareness alone is not sufficient for protection. Awareness of multiplicity can make you vulnerable through exposure to the massive stigma about these experiences. People’s relationships and jobs can be at risk if they are outed. There’s also a vulnerability in inheriting a whole stack of rigid ideas about what it means to multiple, for example when people are told that their systems must have a certain number or type of parts, or that they will inevitably remember horrific abuse, or that therapy is essential, long term, and extraordinarily painful. People can be vulnerable due to the language of symptoms where the number of parts, degree of dissociation, or level of incapacity is used as a measure for the severity of pain and worthiness of support of the person. People can also be vulnerable when multiple communities behave in alienating ways, such as being overly concerned with ‘faked DID’. Sometimes people find that their systems are overly fluid, or overly rigid and fixed in ways that make growth and adapting to new circumstances extremely difficult. The dissociation can limit the healing effect of positive life circumstances and loving relationships.

There can also be vulnerabilities in other people being aware of a person’s multiplicity. Sometimes abusive people use multiplicity against a person. This can happen with children who are being poorly treated, but adults can also be vulnerable. For example, people with parts who are in abusive relationships can have horrific experiences such as having a young part who has previously been abused being triggered during sex for the titillation of their partner. Multiplicity can be magnificent and protective, but it can also be devastatingly vulnerable. People with parts who find that their multiplicity is not effective to protect them from abuse or trauma may become extremely fluid, chaotic, poly-fragmented, or build massive numbers of parts. (this is not the only reason systems can function in these ways!) Systems that have experienced this kind of harm can be like labyrinths designed to confuse and hide essential information from an abuser or series of abusers who have discovered how to use the dissociation to their own advantage. Often this design also confuses therapists and the person with parts, and can frighten and overwhelm those who are seeking to understand, map, and make sense of themselves. Realising that confusion is the intention and that it serves a very important purpose can be a valuable first step in learning to love an inner labyrinth. Understanding triggers and anchors and knowing how to use them can be a powerful way of ensuring that abusive people cannot use them against you.

Known multiplicity can also be interpreted in ways that are harmful. For example, some people are put through traumatic exorcisms to get rid of parts who have been understood as spirits or demons. People with parts who have different gender identities have accessed trans support services that haven’t considered multiplicity as a possibility and have unintentionally suppressed and rejected all the parts of one gender. Multiplicity can be misdiagnosed and mistreated, for example if it’s seen as schizophrenia treatment may concentrate on keeping the person lucid and stopping the voices via medication – which can translate to tranquilising the person until they can’t hear their parts, and trying to prevent switching. Some people have accessed therapy that has interpreted and navigated their multiplicity in ways that they later come to believe was deeply harmful.

Multiplicity can also make you more vulnerable alienation, loneliness, and self hate. These are simply things that everyone without a peer group is vulnerable to. For people who don’t have parts, there’s often something strange and fascinating about the idea. What it can be difficult to understand is just how strange people without parts can seem to those of us who have them. This is our ‘normal’, and we can feel very alien and alone in the world. This can be compounded by the issue of masks. Many people wear social masks, the face they present to the world. People with parts are often thought to be wearing masks and then revealing their ‘true’ self when they switch. Pre diagnosis, everyone in my life had a different idea of who Sarah really was, and we ourselves couldn’t figure out who we ‘really’ were. Different people formed bonds with different parts, and most of my relationships were one-part bonds only. Switching caused chaos. I would invite friends over to visit, then switch later on and be confused and frustrated that people who didn’t seem to particularly like me were on my doorstep. They, on the other hand, experienced me as moody, unpredictable, and very strange. A freak. I also had big issues with connecting with other people’s buried parts – not the dissociative kind, but the kind we all have. For example, someone who presents themselves to the world as together and successful may have a hidden part that is lost, afraid, and steeped in grief. For some of us with parts, we are used to hearing and feeling things beneath the surface and we accidentally interact with and draw out the hidden parts of other people in ways they can find both deeply moving and intensely uncomfortable. Certainly not necessarily conducive to stable relationships!

It’s hard to be the only one of your kind. This is why bridging the Gap and finding points of connection and similarity common to all people can be so desperately important! It’s also why connections with peers and peer workers are crucial. Everyone needs a space in which the way they function in the world is ‘normal’ and for a few hours they don’t have to explain everything in full, because people get it. Being the only deaf person, the only kid with two Dads, the only scholarship student can be hard. Diverse communities help, and contact with other people who share your experiences also help. However multiple/multiple relationships can also be fraught, while there’s a common language and understanding, there’s also the complexity of two systems and a different type of relationship between each possible pair of parts who are out, as well as the loss and grief of forming connections with parts who go away or are supressed or overruled by other system members. Friendships between multiples can be wonderful but also fragile.

Multiplicity can be life saving. It can help people to contain, protect, and adapt. It can also be a difference that leaves people at greater risk of abuse, exploitation, and isolation. Here lies a tension that many of us peer workers with parts are struggling to engage. We need to hear that multiplicity can be healthy and useful, that there’s hope and that the illness model isn’t the only story that can be told. But it’s the vulnerability of multiplicity that drives us, the knowledge that people are struggling and suffering and being harmed that makes us want to speak out and create resources and healthy communities. The less stigma people encounter, the easier the path to healthy multiplicity is. (this path doesn’t exclude the possibility of integration or fusion) We’re often sold an idea of multiplicity that is about being broken, profoundly alienated from self, where the multiplicity is conflated with the trauma history in a way that makes it difficult to think creatively and respond with enthusiasm to the task of understanding, accepting, and making a wonderful life with yourselves. We don’t have to pretend that multiplicity is any easier than it is, nor do we have to choose only one way to understand it. Like anything in life, and like any kind of difference, there’s deep complexity and ambiguity in our experiences. We need the freedom to be able to engage those honestly, and we need opportunities to be able to combine our collective wisdom and help to reduce some of these vulnerabilities for people.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

Using Anchors to manage Triggers – Multiplicity

Jan 22, 2014Jan 27, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I’ve been writing about triggers lately. This post is specifically about how triggers can affect parts for people with multiplicity, it builds on the information I’ve already shared in

Managing Triggers – an overview of how triggers work and many different approaches to managing them
Mental Health needs better PR – the risks and benefits of the different ways we think about triggers and why we want to manage them
Using Anchors to Manage Triggers – exploring how anchors work and can be used to help with triggers around trauma, anxiety, and other distress

Sometimes parts get stuck, inside or outside, and this can cause problems. Sometimes a part may stop coming out when their trigger to do so disappears, and this can be a terrible loss. Perhaps a child part only came out around a favourite aunt who has passed away. Perhaps a quiet, studious part only came out at uni, and now that you’ve finished the course that part has gone missing. I have one who only comes out at night, down the beach. Wounded and different they have retreated from all the rest of our lives and it is moonlight and solitude that calls their name. When I was originally diagnosed and my shrink was hoping to make contact with some of these parts, we told them with despair that a counselling office was not their world and I had no idea how to get them here, or even if that was a good idea. The shrink was likewise baffled about how to engage with parts who only came out at school, or during storms, or in candlelight.

Two things lay beneath this dilemma – a fundamental question of the purpose and direction of therapy – was it about us making ourselves function and presentable in the shrink’s world, or about the shrink being able to follow us into our own… or some kind of collaboration and bridging of this Gap? Was it about illness or a Grand Adventure? The other was simply the lack of awareness on both our and the shrink’s part that triggers can be changed and wielded deliberately.

Sometimes it helps to change the triggers that call parts out. I have one in particular who responds to threat and manages violence. Parts with roles like this can become restless and destructive when things start to improve in your life, because they are inadvertently being written out of the life. As this role is needed less and less, they come out infrequently, sometimes inappropriately, and the rest of the system responds with frustration instead of gratitude. Heroes of the old regime, these parts find there’s no room for them in the new world order. Changing the trigger that calls them out can be a powerful place to start changing or expanding their role to have more life in it.

This can be a simple matter of forming a new association with being out. Every time they are out, to have a new chosen trigger present – someone calling their name, a piece of music, a bracelet, bare feet on grass, pink nail polish. It needs to be something they want and have chosen, something that resonates with them. A trigger that doesn’t evoke a response of some kind, an emotion, a feeling in the body, a memory, a sense of connection – is no trigger at all. In order to work as a trigger, it must evoke something, it must connect with something that is unique to this part and in some way represents them. Over time this trigger becomes more connected to the experience of being out. Once this link has been made, it can start to become strong enough to be used as an anchor, something that can be used to call them out and invite them to be present.

For my system there’s a sense of distance inside, sometimes some parts are close to the surface and easy to call out, while others are far out in the deeps and beyond any call. Some parts always respond to their triggers, others are unpredictable. Each system is unique, and the process is often more organic than mechanical.

Sometimes parts have a difficult time staying present when they want and need to. It might be that other parts are being triggered out, or that they habitually go away inside under certain types of stress. Sometimes some parts just seem to have a tenuous grasp on the moment, in the body, in the world. They are more like smoke on the wind than a plant in the earth. Anchors can help parts to stay present in times when switching would be dangerous, traumatic, or inappropriate such as driving, sex, or delivering a presentation at work. Clothes are an anchor my system often uses to help to keep a part present. If this part has her boots on, or that part her pearls, it’s much easier for them to stay present. Music is another powerful one, and it can have a lingering effect. An hour of listening to P!nk at high volume before leaving the house can be the anchor a part needs to stay present through the morning. Or the right music on the radio in the car can stop a child part switching out when we’re driving.

We were in some training a while ago and struggling badly. The facilitation was extremely poor, and most days at least one student became distressed by bullying behaviour. I spent a lot of time following people into toilets to offer comfort, and biting my lip during lectures. The group dynamics were being encouraged in such a poor direction that distressed students were maligned as ‘low functioning’ and probably unsuitable for study, rather than offered support. Each day that went by I became more enraged. The part who handles threats was constantly triggered, but their expertise is physical threat – violence, sexual assault and the like. This was an incredibly inappropriate environment for them because none of their skills were useful here. They could not physically respond, even by screaming, to the increasing sense of being trapped and forced to watch as people were hurt. In fact all their responses; their obvious pain, their supressed anger, their capacity for action, played against us in this setting. We lacked credibility when we responded this way, tongue tied, vehement, and desperate to escape.

It took a lot of thought but we finally were able to come up with a better approach. A different part who could handle this kind of ‘threat’ that was psychological and subtle rather than physical and overt. Someone who wasn’t afraid and therefore wasn’t sitting at a desk with their adrenaline thrumming. Someone who could speak up without anger in their voice, and who therefore couldn’t be told off for being rude. Someone who could laugh and break tension while speaking our truths. Once we figured this out, we changed which clothes and makeup we wore to the classes, changed where we sat and how we engaged. It was still a deeply unpleasant experience, like being a participant in a social experiment about power. We still had some troubles with the furious part being triggered out. But we had a better approach and were able to finish the course without being reprimanded for any behaviour, without self harming to cope, and without becoming compliant and submissive to the bully. Anchors can be powerful.

Sometimes they can be also be used against us in ways that hurt us. Multiplicity sometimes makes us more vulnerable.

Awesome quote – Grand adventure (or, my philosophy of multiplicity in a nutshell)

Jan 12, 2014Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth giving it’s own post to. A few years ago, I was seeing a therapist I was not getting along with at all. My life was chaotic, lonely, and very painful. I was scared and confused about my diagnosis of DID. I felt trapped between a therapeutic approach that felt deeply wrong for me (such as getting rid of parts deemed by the therapist to be either too damaged, or too hostile to be integrated) and all the books I’d read that said without therapy I would never recover. Caught in this dilemma, I called Lifeline.

By sheer luck, I spoke with a guy who clearly knew a lot about DID. He listened very attentively as I explained my situation and how distressing I was finding it. He drew out of me my inarticulate intuition that this therapy was not the right place for me. Then he framed what I was feeling in a neat summary that has stayed with me ever since.

Just because you’re split, doesn’t mean everyone else is whole. You can choose to engage this as an illness, or you can go on a grand adventure of self discovery.

That’s it – my philosophy of multiplicity in a nutshell. I don’t mean that people who find a medical model approach to their multiplicity can’t also be on grand adventures of self discovery! But that for me, at that time, these were different options. I couldn’t have both, not with this therapist. So I took a risk that all the books were wrong. I started to wonder how, if we only ever studied those who were formally diagnosed with DID and stayed in therapy, we could possibly know that people never recovered from, or lived with DID successfully without therapy? I set up this idea of The Grand Adventure as my guiding star, my compass that let me know when I was on the right path or not. When a choice would take me further away from it, I didn’t take it. I kept to the paths that moved me closer to treating my life, and my multiplicity, as a grand adventure. Adventure can be painful, even agonising, but it is also awe inspiring, beautiful, profound, and challenging. It takes you places you couldn’t have dreamed of. It’s a very long way from my original plans to be the perfect patient in therapy and ‘heal’ as quickly as possible to get on with my life. And it’s served me well. I’m not waiting for therapy to finish, or integration, or fusion, or to feel like I’ve got over my childhood, to begin living. My life is a grand adventure. Some of it hurts terribly. Some of it is breathtaking. All of it is worthwhile.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

Dark bodypainting self portraits

Jan 10, 2014Jan 10, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

It’s been a rough few days. Yesterday, I barely spoke all day. I remember when I was living in a caravan park, this used to happen. Days in a row would go by in which I was silent, except for my journal, except for the weeping. There’s a relief in it, sometimes. I hide from the world, lock the doors, keep the curtains drawn. My paints sang to me and the day turned into a collage of sleeping, body painting, and photographing myself. When all else makes no sense, make art. I have my souvenirs from the underworld. Yes, it’s strange, but it’s cheaper than hospital. I’m still cleaning paint off the bathroom floor. It’s better than cleaning up blood. These are a small sample of the photos I took.

So many questions. Why the psychosis? How is it linked to art? Why does creativity, not just any art, but the dark kind, help? How much of this do I need? Can I pre-empt the fraying? How do I fit this into my life plans – a job, sharing a house, becoming a mother, when it’s strange, anti-social, dark? I want to get my camera fixed, the good one, and buy a tripod. I’m supposed to be going back to college soon. I can’t fit it all in. My inks are singing to me. Is this how I heal? Ink not blood, and Wrist poems, and Making art. I don’t know. This is not about pain. There’s something else down the bottom of this well, this rabbit hole. Something I don’t understand. The voice of the night wind perhaps. Something – some one – needing a voice and a place at the table, even if the cup is chipped and the soup is watered down. A sense of freedom from the world, a place where my identity is solely that of ‘artist’.

About Transgender

Jan 8, 2014Dec 23, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

For those of us who are a bit new to the idea and language around what it is to be trans, it can be a bit confusing or intimidating. Some of us are just baffled, some of us are trying to engage but worried about getting it wrong and being offensive. Some of us are loud and offensive about being baffled.

Some cultures cope just fine with the idea that some people have a strong sense of gender that is different to their body. On the whole, Western culture has not. We divide our world by gender starting at or before birth, and people who find their bodies place them on the wrong side of that divide are highly vulnerable to ridicule, disgust, and violence. This divide also causes strife for gay people, partly because the idea behind it is that all boys and all girls have more in common with their own gender than with each other, and that safety and discretion are obtained by separating them for private acts such as toileting, changing clothes, sports, and medical care. When we think that our young girls are made safe from feeling exposed by segregation from boys, having a gay girl (or a girl who is thought to be gay) in the class can trigger a powerful sense of threat, and with that fear often comes rejection or even violence. The same goes for when a young trans girl (ie a girl with a male body) uses the girl’s facilities – or the boy’s facilities. These minority gender and sexual identities are often highly vulnerable and don’t have a safe place in a world divided by gender and assuming that everyone is straight.

So what is trans? A quick guide to the language – someone who is trans has a sense of gender identity that is different to their body. Those of us who have a gender identity that is the same as our body are not called ‘normal’, but rather cis-gendered. This is because it is normal for some people in every community to be trans. Some people with a female body have a strong sense of being male. This is different to feeling like you are female but masculine (or male but feminine) – I have tomboy girls in my system and their sense of themselves is completely different to the guy parts. Being trans doesn’t mean you’re gay. There’s a difference between gender identity and gender expression, and also with our connection to the traits we’ve bound up in our ideas about what is feminine and masculine. They are all connected, certainly, but also distinct. Some trans people are gay, or bi, some are straight. (I touch on this is my post What bisexuality is and 9 things it isn’t) Some trans people take hormones or have surgeries to help themselves look and feel more like their real gender. Some trans people don’t have the money or social support to come out. The rates of suicide and violence against trans people are far higher than average.

In some ways and areas the trans community has been able to get legal supports more quickly than the gay community, in areas of recognition such as legal documents and relationships. In other areas the trans community is still far more vulnerable and at risk, particularly when it comes to social acceptance. Part of the struggle for this is that many gay people are willing to openly identify as gay, and want their lives and love and families to be visible. Many trans people do not identify as trans, they identify as male or female, and what they desire is to be accepted and to ‘pass’ for being their real gender. For many people, being trans is a source of shame, and being identified as trans is humiliating. This means that there are not many trans people willing to become activists to help to raise awareness and further the cause of social justice. So the community is very vulnerable. This is changing more and more, as is the traditional either/or binary of identifying as male/female. Some people identify as both, or as neither, or feel different on different days. There’s nothing wrong with any of this!

Trans issues and needs are highly relevant in my own work with people who have parts, because it’s quite common for different parts to have a different gender identity. This can be tough for people, sometimes trans supports aren’t multiple friendly and want people to choose to be either male or female all the time. Sometimes multiple supports aren’t trans friendly and treat being multiple as if that means it’s never healthy to access trans supports or to want to identify as trans. The reality of course, is more complex. Sometimes multiple systems want to transition because their primary part or parts who run the day to day life are trans. Sometimes one part is trans and wants to know about temporary devices and supports (such as prosthetics, makeup, or breast binding) to be able to be out as their gender and go to a movie or out to dinner. Many multiples who are gender diverse have great difficulty with things like using public, gender specific toilets, or engaging with gendered communities and activities such as sports. Sometimes supporting a trans part can be as simple as buying a pair of guys or girls shoes for them to wear, or having a partner willing to use the correct gender pronoun when they’re out. Sometimes trans parts in a girl body will find it easier that they can wear male clothing in the western culture and this is pretty normal for girls today, sometimes being seen as a tomboy rather than a guy just makes them feel painfully invisible. Sometimes trans parts in a guy body find that the rest of their system feels so threatened by being seen as female that it’s very hard to get any gestures of being female accepted.

I have male parts in my own system and we’re still struggling to figure out how to engage this positively. One of mine is a black humoured cross dresser who wears more makeup than most of the girls in my system and finds it deeply amusing that he can go to work in drag without anyone being the wiser. Another is a gentle and shy gay guy who is so lonely and quiet that I know almost nothing about him. I come from a background where women were run down and the feminine was treated with disgust and disdain. Being female was equated with being weak. The only women who were treated with respect were highly masculine. I remember the courage it took to tell people that I wanted children, that I felt highly maternal. It took a lot of processing to embrace being female, to find strength and beauty in it. It took possibly even more to reconcile myself to some aspects of the feminine, and to my attraction to women. So it’s been highly threatening to process that some parts of us feel male. And even more confusing to us, that they are not necessarily particularly masculine guys at that. We’re working on it, gently. In our culture, gender can bring out a deep sense of threat and fear even in those of us who consider ourselves to be very accepting.

So, let’s work to make more room in our lives for diversity in gender. Let’s embrace the trans people in our communities, in our own systems, in our schools and workplaces. Let’s stop trying to force people to ‘choose a side’ when their real, authentic state at the moment is confused, ambivalent, both, or neither. Some trans people find that after years of only identifying as their real gender, through all the hell of outing themselves and transitioning, they are finally safe to acknowledge that they like some activities, or qualities, or have some skills or interests that are traditionally seen as being of the other gender, and that’s okay. So do most cis-gendered people. 🙂 Let’s be honest about fear and threat and work to make everyone feel safer, and be safer. Let’s make it possible for trans people who want more than anything to pass, to not have their trans identity subsume all the rest of who they are, and to not have to live in fear of being outed. Let’s support the trans activists and people who live openly and answer questions and humanise, and remind us of the painful, awful statistics that show we have such a long way to go for social acceptance of trans people.

If you’d like to read some more about trans issues or find some support, here are a few links I’ve come across recently that I liked. If you’d like to add any other links or thoughts, particularly if you’re trans and feel I’ve misrepresented you in some way, please comment or email me. 🙂 As I’ve said, this isn’t my ‘home turf’, I’m somewhat new to the topic and might step on toes or repeat myths without being aware of it. Wherever you stand, I hope this article has given you some food for thought.

Readers’ Top 10 Transgender Stories of 2013 | Courtney O’Donnell.

All About Trans | Encouraging better understanding of trans people in the UK.

From bullied child to transgender woman: my coming of age | Paris Lees | Society | The Guardian.

35 Trans Women I Had #Herocrushes On In 2013 | Autostraddle.

For more information see articles listed on Trans and Genderqueer Links, or scroll through posts in the category of sex, sexuality, and gender.

On setting goals for a new year

Jan 1, 2014Dec 30, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

2013 is finished. It’s been a mad, mad year. I’ve learned a hell of a lot. I’ve lost a couple of friends, one to suicide and two to fights. I’ve learned how to actually critique criticism that’s sent my way, to evaluate it on the basis of my own values – to take in what would bring me closer to my values, and ignore what would take me further from them. It’s only taken me 30 years and it’s not perfect but WOW what a difference skills like this can make. I’m finally starting to wrap my head around the idea of adulthood in a way that’s exciting instead of skin crawling. Awesome.

One skill I do have that I’m often asked about is goal setting. This is always fun for a multiple because there’s so many, and very divergent, goals, needs, and desires. Every year for the past 5 or so years, I write up a goal list. It’s not a list of resolutions. It’s about things I want to do or try or learn, and it’s there as a reference, partly to help guide choices, and partly to try and make sure no one part’s goals are constantly forgotten. Every year I get some goals done and others get added to the year after or left behind as circumstances change. Every year I’m surprised by some wonderful unexpected opportunities that open up that weren’t on my goal list and I go through those open doors and enjoy a life that isn’t always planned and doesn’t always turn out how I think it will. This is how goals work best for me – as guiding lights. They are the things that help me seek after things I desire in life. I’m always happy to be waylaid, and some goals remain frustratingly out of reach. But there are so many things I love and want to do, this isn’t the end of the world.

So, for example, back in 2011 my personal goals list included items such as:

Establish myself as an independent artist
- get an ABN
- make a website
- start a blog
- arrange business cards
- attend MYOB training at WEA
- attend any other available training about business for artists
Continue with ACA visual arts degree in Semester 2
Continue working with MIFSA/as a peer worker
try to pick up about 2 days p/wk total workload
Continue working with the Dissociative Disorders workgroup
- possibly develop a talk for THEMHS
Arrange suitable short-medium term living quarters
- shed?
- caravan?
Apply for training with Lifeline to become a telephone counsellor
Apply for training with Radio Adelaide/Poets on Air
Take back up Sunflower Shop voluntary position if time permits
Publish or get ready for publication a booklet of poems and an introduction to managing DID
Investigate becoming a mentor or foster carer with Life Without Barriers
Take up learning Japanese
Explore Japanese style ink paintings and poetry
Develop my camera skills
- create a portfolio of work based on Singapore trip
Develop work for exhibition
- SAW
- Mental Health Week
Continue to develop my health support system
- find and begin work with a good psychiatrist
- continue building my personal library
- continue to investigate options for health, buteyko, chiro, massage, diet etc
Pick up at least one form of regular physical exercise
- dance
- pilates
- martial art/self defense
- cycling
- walking
Continue to develop social networks – major goal to have at least one physical location (however small) and one person for each member of my system to feel safe and at home with.
- goth community
- alternative/hippy community
- christian community (maybe salvos?)
- creative community
- DID/MH support
- gay/queer/trans community
- dating and friends

Some of these things were far easier to pull off than others. When life had so many barriers and so few needs being met, I found it was far more effective to focus energy on the goals that were proving easier to meet rather than impose my own hierarchy on them. I also found that sometimes obvious sequences of goals were not that way at all – for example I expected that I would find housing, do a degree, then get work. Things worked differently for me. Housing was phenomenally difficult, whereas I found many passions and work opportunities (usually unpaid, admittedly) first. So part of what makes goal lists work for me is that they are only ideas to navigate by, not things I MUST do or things to make myself feel shame about. I still haven’t taken up Japanese, and I’m okay with that! Maybe I will one day, maybe I’ll never get to it.

I also break my goals down into very small steps. If I try very hard to reach a goal and can’t, I haven’t made the step small enough. For example, I had a number of failed attempts to get back to uni after becoming very unwell and derailing my life plans. Each of these attempts took up all my time and energy, and each time the sense of failure was profound and massively eroding my confidence and sense of hope. I finally decided that this was too big a jump – from bed bound by illness to university. So I did smaller steps. I started to do one day classes at the local WEA. Then I took on two day classes. Then classes that lasted over three or four weeks. I got myself back into routines of travelling to a place to learn each week, of finding my materials from last week, doing homework, navigating parking and the lifts and new people. Then classes that ran over a term. Finally I graduated to term long Tafe ‘Short Courses’, and then I took on semester long classes as an external student, from the visual arts degree in college I wanted to get into. Finally, I enrolled in the degree. I have finished exactly half of my first year so far, and it’s slow and difficult, and I love it, and I’m often very sick and unable to attend. This process has been humbling and frustrating and time consuming, but ultimately far more successful and exciting.

Without To Do lists my life would be impossible. I’m a dissociative multiple who struggles to track information and I have many projects going at once in different life areas. My goals list is another way I check out how things are going in major life domains – social, spiritual, work… and to remind myself about important new journeys I want to take – whether that’s finding a friend to go to the goth clubs with, or exploring the local permaculture groups. Sometimes life is best navigated by going where it takes you. Sometimes you need to run into it, go exploring, try something new, and find new passions, friends, ideas, and experiences to speak to your soul. Goals are best when they are in service of a great life, congruent with your values, and easily cast aside when they come into conflict with values. It’s about living thoughtfully, giving consideration to the life we build every day, so often without thinking about it or realising that our ‘normal’ is a choice and we can make other choices. This is not about success or failure, it’s about maps and star charts and sailing the high seas, about tacking into the wind and setting forth to have a meaningful life.

Power shifts in a multiple system

Dec 23, 2013Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

I gave a couple of talks recently about supporting people through a dissociative crisis (more info and resources here). Some of this talk was focused on supporting people who have parts, and explored some common crisis points for people with parts. One of these I described as ‘civil war’ – ie major power shifts and fights between different parts.

Many people with parts or with DID are a mix of aware and unaware of other parts. An internal war like this can be very similar to the kind of massive conflict that everyone can also go through when there’s a lot of stress and contradictory frameworks for how to respond to it. Sometimes the fighting is as clear and overt as Paul hates the way Sky is running things and her choices about friends or career, and has decided he would do a better job. Sometimes the struggle is underground, messy and confusing and conflicted. When parts are at war with each other they can do a pretty effective job of tying the shoelaces of every other part so that no one can function very well and no one gets any needs met. If this is intense and continues for a long time, profound distrust, loathing, terror, confusion, and dysfunction can result. On the other hand, if one or two parts are more powerful and able to dominate, they can effectively become dictators to the rest of the system. If they are compassionate and caring of weaker and more vulnerable parts their leadership can create great stability and peace. If they are brutal and uncaring awful abuses can occur.

Power is an interesting concept to define in regards to how a multiple system works. It can mean different things. Sometimes having the most life skills gives a part power because all other parts will have to allow a switch at some point to be able to manage life. Sometimes it can be having the ability to stay ‘out’ in the body the longest. Sometimes it’s force of personality, or the capacity to be heard by all the other parts as a voice and so influence them, or the ability to chose which parts can come out and when, or being the most frightening part, or being a part most other parts trust and put faith in, or having a lot of environmental triggers that bring a part out often, or getting along the best with the therapist or other people with power in their world, or having been around a long time, and so on. Some forms of power are the same kinds of power we see in any group of people such as the person who knows a great deal and who’s opinions are therefore treated with respect. Some forms of power are quite specific to the way internal multiple communities can work with regards to switching and control over each other.

People with DID have often come through some pretty awful things. Many of us have had little or no experience with healthy communities. Many of us have had little or no experience with the responsible and ethical exercise of power. So it’s no surprise that sometimes our internal communities are structured in ways that partly work and partly cause harm. If all our role models for strength, leadership, and power were abusive, ineffectual, unaware, or disconnected, it’s a challenge for parts to use their strength and power in ways that are connected, insightful, and empathic. If all our experience of group dynamics is that the strongest get their needs met while the weaker ones struggle, the really vulnerable get humiliated and tortured, and the alienated ones rebel, of course we find similar dynamics in our own systems. One of the challenges of being part of a multiple system is to help the structure become one that brings out the best in each part. Many multiples are a complex combination of some great internal dynamics and some awful. The more awful the dynamics often the more intense the suffering, and sometimes the more severe the dysfunction.

In speaking of my own system, I’ve been through a number of major power shifts, some of which were extremely distressing and some of which have been brilliantly helpful. One of the first civil wars for us was when we were 10. 10 was a bad year. People died. Pets ran away and didn’t come home. We moved house. More pets died. Sarah, ie all of us, crashed. The rather fragile sense of emotional security we’d managed to develop was completely swept away. Death bowled us over like a flash flood through a house of sticks. We became paranoid and suicidal. We started self harming in a creative variety of ways. We decided that we could no longer cope with bullying and loneliness at school and did whatever it took to be ill enough to not have to attend. Chronic, severe tonsillitis led to recurrent hospitalisations, tonsillectomy, and severe secondary infections as our immune system struggled. Nightmares became intense, often we would be sleepless and walk through the house at nights checking on sleeping family members to make sure they had not died. We developed elaborate plans for fighting, restraining, or poisoning possible home intruders who might try to kill a family member. In short, it was a catastrophic collapse of the approaches we had been using to navigate life until then. Crisis.

War ensured. Two primary powerful parts with completely different frameworks tore everyone to pieces in a tug of war over who’s approach was best. One of the parts was primarily concerned with ethics and moral behaviour. She’d been educated in sunday school in a deeply unbalanced ‘turn the other cheek’ way where love, self sacrifice, self hate, and shame were deeply entangled. She was also highly empathic and intelligent and understood that surviving was more than a bodily thing, it was about remaining recognisably human. Her deepest fear was making life choices that meant she could no longer have respect for herself as a person. The other part was primarily concerned with survival. She was lonely and disconnected and made choices in the absence of grounding relationships. She had a pragmatic approach to philosophical challenges such as ‘is it better to be a dead pacifist or a live, lapsed pacifist’ and was unhesitating in responding to violence, deprivation, or abuse rapidly and without concerning herself with ethical frameworks to understand or justify her choices. She could stand up to any authority figure if she believed they were wrong on the basis of gut instinct, and either take punishment or run from it. Her deepest fear was death or being trapped.

We have since come to understand that these very different perspectives are both vital. They balance each other and are both needed. At the time however, all hell broke loose as we began to shift from being ruled by twisted ethics to being ruled by anything goes if it helps us survive. We radically changed our sense of what was acceptable behaviour, for example, parts began stealing, while other parts became suicidal with shame about the stealing which they had only the vaguest and most confusing of senses was not actually being done by them. The brain was a battleground while the body was under assault. The head noise was unbearable, and the sense of disconnection not only from peers or family, but from all other humans, became profound.

TW for religious content

We had terrifying experiences of co-consciousness and became secretly convinced that we were possessed by the devil. On occasions we’d lock ourselves in the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror and watch the switching happen, where the face was the same but the eyes were no longer my eyes, and try to work out how something that felt so profound internally as a switch could make so little visible change from outside. Some parts developed a terror of the mirror and became convinced that another girl lived in it and pretended to be us. We had a psychotic fear that if she walked out of the frame first we would be trapped within the mirror as a reflection and she would inhabit our life. Mirrors became fascinating and terrifying daily encounters with something deeply confusing about ourselves we had no language to explain. Religious experiences within a pentecostal Christian church deepened beliefs of possession and demonic power, and terror that we could not be cured, were personally directly responsible for all suffering and evil in the world and the crucifixion of god, and were beyond redemption. Self harm and painful medical experiences served as self punishment and torture for being evil, and helped to keep suicide at bay. Other parts took on nihilistic beliefs instead that made them suicidally depressed.

End TW

This particular war settled when the twisted ethics part won the upper hand again. A number of things led to this, intense experiences of shame, punishment, and a particular conversation with an adult who was desperately important to her who told her that due to her behaviour they no longer believed that she loved them, and she would have to work hard to be obedient and good enough to prove this to them. As this spoke directly to her worst fears she gathered all her strength in a desperate effort for dominance and won. Life returned to the profound dark/light split of the compliant and rebellious who operated independently and knew little of each other. Stable, but remaining profoundly unhappy, different parts gathering various symptoms of a person in a state of extreme distress, and chronically suicidal.

As an example of a different kind of power shift, we once found ourselves homeless and on the run from an abusive relationship. The part who had been running most of the day to day life was exhausted, broken hearted, and suffering from intense anxiety. The rest of us were becoming increasingly frustrated with her dominant role considering her incapacity. She was used to her role and did not trust anyone else to be as competent. (for more about this, see Understanding Roles) After a great deal of arguing, the rest of us teamed up and deliberately moved her to a place deep in the system, far from the surface, where she could not be triggered out. This was never intended to be permanent and was not done with malice. Then we proceeded to celebrate our newfound freedom and start learning some new skills and discovering what we liked to do.

After a short time things started to go badly wrong. Burying this part so deep had an unexpected side effect. Dissociative containment between her and the rest of us started to break down. Her intense anxiety began to flood the whole system. Parts who by their confident (some might say cocky) nature, simply don’t experience anxiety started having panic attacks. They were not only inexperienced and ill equipped to handle this, it deeply threatened their sense of sense and was putting the whole system at risk of extreme dysfunction.

We quickly brought the anxious part back out to the front of the system, and containment reasserted itself. But the experience was not wasted. Rather than being angry or frightened at her treatment, she was relieved that we’d proved we could function without her intense over involvement. Like a worn out mother of adult children who had displayed surprising capacity she began to step back more and more and allow other parts to take on more roles and skills. Many other parts were made eager by their taste of a life that was direct and personal rather than vicarious and second hand, and they keenly enjoyed the opportunity to develop and grow with more time out. This power shift was slower, but far more stable and effective.

As this is getting very long, I’ll continue in another post. The third power shift I want to share about was as a result of diagnosis and interacting with the mental health system, and it too has proved to be very stable and useful.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

I am a Tardis

Dec 21, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Yesterday was very hard. I woke early because my bedroom retains heat badly and after several days over 40C it was a sweat box this morning. I was weeping with frustration and exhaustion after efforts to rig a temporary screen so I could keep the window open overnight while Zoe was indoors (she destroys it when she’s outdoors) and to drag my small but awkward portable fan into the room, followed by a cold shower still left me dripping with sweat and sleepless.

Work was a 7 hour gig which turned out to be incredibly busy. Rose worked it with me and fell into all the traps I struggled with at first in this line of work, not stretching or taking enough breaks or moving her injured leg around often enough. By the end of the day we were both sitting in the car park in horrible pain and completely exhausted.
Some of the parents were depressingly scary and aggressive with their kids, and the last guy in my line, who’s kid I’m painting after my finish time, unpaid, because they had been in the line, laughs at me when I wince in pain and jibes about how ‘hard’ a job where you sit around all day must be.

Years ago during a time of crisis in my life, pre diagnosis with DID, I can clearly recall one of us saying to the rest of the parts – any of you who will not survive what is going to happen over the next few months, go. Hide in burrows and caves. Come back later. I’ll get us through this. At the time it made little sense to me, but sure enough all our inner kids and more vulnerable or hopeful and gentle parts disappeared for a long time, and severe dissociation descended.

Fast forward to the small hours of the morning now, several intense and distressing conversations with no resolution later and my head is finally almost calm. There’s been screaming and weeping and now a kind of quiet. No one has hidden in burrows. Things are not all okay yet either. Some of us are holding the fort. Some are deep inside, ships far out at sea where their pain can’t harm. Sometimes all us parts are close together, bunched up tight listening to each others thoughts and watching life over each others shoulders. Sometimes we’re spread far apart. At the moment I feel like there are whole deserts and jungles and oceans between us.

Tonight I am a Tardis, much bigger on the inside.

And so we hope. We hurt, safely. We bring what skills we can to the present, what gentleness this easing of pressure inspires. We drink bitter drinks to ground, lay naked in the dark, surrender to the demands of sleep.

Thoughts about peer work and DID and community

Dec 19, 2013Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 12 Comments

It is incredibly hot here again. It’s currently 42.3C and I feel like my face is melting. Hot weather and I do not get along since I developed fibromyalgia. So I’m home, in front of my little portable air con, preparing for my drive off to Mifsa to give the talk Supporting Someone in a Dissociative Crisis this evening. Apparently I decided the best way to prepare for this would be to spend the day on the net getting into big conversations with people.

I’m getting frustrated again that I can’t blog as much as I want to. I have so many things I want to share, my list of posts to write goes into several pages. I’m still hoping to find time to blog about all the great talks I got to hear from at the World Hearing Voices Congress last month. And I’m often in amazing conversations, taking down quotes to write about later but so rarely get to come back to them. I think part of the problem is that often the topics I’m wanting to write about are big ones – suicide, multiplicity, sexuality and so on – and I really want to do a decent job. Sometimes I let myself just spiel and post, but often, especially if it’s a post that I’m hoping will have useful information in it instead of just a bit of a glimpse into my own thoughts and life – it’s not something I can write in a moment. I need to get several parts to read over it, I try and edit it from very different perspectives, and I try and include links to other information or resources when I’ve found them. That’s not a short process. I wish it was. Or I wish I was paid for writing them so I could more easily carve out time each week for those kinds of posts. Which I guess kind of brings me back to my idea about writing a book…

What do you think? A book is a great thing. You can borrow it from a library or friend. You can pick it up and put it down and carry it around with you. You can underline bits and cross things out and write your own thoughts in the margins. But a blog is good too – it’s always free, especially if you use the net at the local cafe or library. You can even contact the author or write comments underneath. It’s a growing, evolving process, with small bites of information. I like the format, it has a lot going for it.

So, today I was talking online with a friend about internet safety, and scams, and how important it is for people to be aware, and I thought to myself I keep hearing this word awareness. I hear it all the time around the ‘days’ we have like the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women or raising awareness about MS, or how to talk with people in wheelchairs without driving them nuts. I have a whole stack of physical and psychiatric stuff going on, and my awesome friends likewise, I still have no hope of remembering everything I’m supposed to be aware of. I find myself wondering if a different approach wouldn’t be more helpful – like a ‘how to engage stuff you don’t know much about in a way that doesn’t drive people crazy’ approach. How to generally be a helpful person open to hearing new things you hadn’t considered instead of trying to be aware of every illness, condition, social concern, and so on.

Isn’t this partly what we’re doing in spaces like Hearing Voices groups – the facilitators don’t have to understand everyone’s different perspective or experience, they are just trying to hold a safe respectful space where everyone can speak for themselves and engage each other… maybe we can support better and more respectful ways of engaging with things we haven’t personally experienced that are easier than massive lists of things to be aware of? Even as someone working to raise awareness of mental health experiences such as multiplicity I think this. Maybe if we work together to create a model for engaging with our diverse communities we can relieve some of the burden of anxiety so many of us feel when we are aware we lack awareness and wind up not engaging or falling over our own feet with stress worrying that we’re being unintentionally wildly offensive or upsetting.

On that note… I read a blog post today where a person with DID is expressing deep frustration with some current ‘awareness raising’ stuff going on over in the UK that they feel falls so far short of the mark that it’s actually worse than the usual ignorance and myths about DID. I felt that Bourbon made some really good points about issues with sensationalism in the media, and misconceptions about how parts can function and overlap. I recommend going over to have a read of it – What is DID? (a response to media campaigns). When Bourbon started talking about their (gender neutral as I’m not sure of pronoun preference) perception of what DID actually is, I was concerned. Here’s a brief quote from the end of the article:

In reality, those with DID feel far from special and intruiging. A life with DID is actually spent hiding away, keeping yourself as small as possible so you don’t get noticed. There is often so much fear and pain and confusion coursing around you and the whole system it can feel like you are paralysed. Of course there are teeny tiny moments when life with DID doesn’t feel THAT BAD, but that can only really be fully appreciated when you take note of the alternative extreme lows.

This is where I feel deeply concerned. I don’t know Bourbon, I’ve read a little of their blog today, some of the earlier posts have been made private but they’ve been writing for awhile and I can see a whole lot of work going into being open and supportive about a life with DID and all the challenges that can pose. It’s always difficult to try and respond as respectfully as possible to someone who’s clearly upset about something that really hurts them, while disagreeing with them. We had a bit of a conversation in the comments before they closed them for a break (which is brilliant, and something I wish I’d thought of with this blog instead of closing the comments entirely for the first 2 years. Although sadly that meant it ate my last reply which was quite long and thought through, sigh). I thought I’d share my thoughts about this here too, because there are some amazing people, like Bourbon, out on the net and in their communities, all trying to raise awareness and share information. And yet so often we make each other uncomfortable in some way, or somehow our stories obscure other people’s stories that are very different. It’s not an easy situation, there’s a lot of effort and goodwill and yet the community as a whole can quickly fracture instead of pulling together.

I was going to just pull a few quotes from our conversation in the comments, but then it seemed like that could be picking and choosing to make things fit my perspective best. So I thought I’d quote the lot instead, although I haven’t run that part Bourbon (as they’ve currently closed the comments and I have no way of contacting them). The comments and blog post are both public and I’ve linked to it so I don’t think that will be a concern. Correct me if I’ve got that wrong!

Sarah:

I get that you are really pissed off and feeling unheard but I was uncomfortable with some of the ways you were presenting DID too. I think for me (as someone with DID) one of the ones I wanted to speak to is your statement that having DID is primarily about suffering, with only tiny moments of relief. That really distresses me. I absolutely get that pain and distress is a HUGE amount of the picture for many, many people, but that doesn’t speak to my experience. I suffer when I’ve been hurt and traumatised, and I’m in terrible pain when things have gone appalling wrong in my life with things like homelessness, but it’s not my DID that makes me suffer. That’s a subtle difference but for me, an important one. When anguish and agony are presented as normal – even inevitable and inescapable daily realities for everyone with DID, that worries me. I think we accidentally set people up for much worse experiences when they don’t hear other stories and ways of thinking about their situation. When we expect suffering we miss opportunities for joy and hope and delight and wonder. I don’t think it has to be this way – and that certainly hasn’t been the story of my own life

Bourbon:

I’m really pleased for you that your DID doesn’t cause great suffering in your life now and I am sorry that you feel distressed by me pointing out that a lot of DID is pain and confusion. Don’t think I don’t delight in the fact that one of my littles experiences true joy for half an hour when with my therapist, or I am not appreciative of the fact that I have an alter who reacts quickly to external danger from other people. But at the moment, whilst I am engaging in heavy duty trauma therapy, this is not what my DID is primarily about. I experience joy in my life that has nothing to do with my DID – and that is what is important for me. Life outside of a disorder is important to me.

I take your point that educating people with all the negatives/realities of DID MAY set people up for worse experiences in their own lives – but what I am not going to do is exaggerate and ‘liven up’ the positives in the eye of the public at the expense of showing what DID is like for a lot of sufferers. Like I said, there are little moments when life with DID doesn’t feel that bad; and maybe I could have actually given some examples, like I have done above, but that is as far as it goes.

Reality with DID is tough. Yes our attitude can soften the edges (because even a little having fun in therapy can be viewed as a negative to the disorder – who actually WANTS to be in a 26 year old body but behaving like a 5 year old?) but the public doesn’t need to be educated about our attitude. They need to be educated about the facts, the symptoms, the reality. Attitude is a side-line; not a focus.

Sarah:

What you’ve said here is that you’re doing heavy duty trauma work and that is painful as all out. I don’t see that as being about the DID, if you’d been awfully traumatised and didn’t have DID you would still be hurting like hell and having some horrible therapy sessions. For me they are separate things – the experience of being multiple and the experience of having been chronically traumatised. While they can be deeply connected it’s not the DID that is hurting. Reality as someone who has been deeply hurt is tough. That doesn’t haven’t to be reality with DID. Yes there’s confusion and shame and challenges, I’m really not making light of that. But then, there is for all life, however we experience it. Challenges like how to feel alive, how to connect with communities, how to learn more about who we are, these are universal quests and struggles, experienced as much by people with deafness, people from backgrounds with money and power, people whose babies die young, as they are for people with DID – and for people who used to have DID. The specific challenges might be unique but the call to find ways to live well with others and ourselves is the same. So I don’t see this as ‘just’ an attitude. It’s an essential aspect of what it is to be human. When we tell ourselves that suffering is our lot we lose the capacity to engage life in any other way. When we hold up as examples other people who share experiences with us and write off their lives as being primarily about pain we shut down other ways our communities can live.

Years ago, when I was early in the stages of diagnosis, deeply distressed and struggling to find a therapist to work with, I called Lifeline one night. I was in the early stages of working with a new therapist who’s approach I was finding deeply distressing. By luck I spoke with this guy who actually knew something about DID. He encouraged and supported me while I wrestled with this dilemma – keep working with a therapist who was approaching DID in a way that felt completely wrong for me, or go against all the advice I’d read about how you MUST have therapy to heal from DID and walk away knowing it might be months or years before I found another one? He said something to me that has always stayed with me “Just because you’re split, doesn’t mean they’re (other people) whole. You can choose to engage this experience as an illness, or you can go on a grand adventure of self discovery.” (which will of course sometimes also be painful and confronting and so on, like all adventures)

Being invited to think about DID in a different way has been life saving for me, in that I have a life with DID. I don’t think of myself as disordered because I have parts. I don’t think of my parts as symptoms of my illness, which made me fear and resent them. I struggle and suffer at times. I also have amazing and wonderful experiences at times. Playing co-consciously with a 5 year old part was a profoundly moving moment for me, because I’ve spent years getting over my sense of shame and humiliation about having a 5 year old part. So much of what we with DID are wrestling with are things that everyone who has been hurt are wrestling with, and things that everyone who is trying to be human are wrestling with. We don’t have to sell people an idea about DID that is about sickness and anguish, not to each other and not to the public.

Bourbon:

I understand the distinction you are making. I really do. I first started blogging on here saying that I was going to refuse to call it dissociative identity disorder because it isn’t a disorder. But since realising the turmoil me and my system are in day to day then I realise how much of a disorder it is. It seems to me your experience of multiplicity isn’t just about trauma. Fantastic. You’ve built a life outside of that. But my DID is all about trauma. We are riddled with it. My system operates by way of abuse. What I mean by that is abuse is still going on, internally because that is what we grew up believing was the norm. It sounds like you are so much further along your healing that you have made peace with your past and become close to your system. I’m young and only two years into my diagnosis. But I am in therapy with an excellent therapist who has been working with DID for twenty years and one who has written books on the subject. So maybe I will find a way to live with DID in joy like you have. Or maybe I will integrate and be cured of this disorder. Who knows where life will take us? Personally, I hope I’m integrated. But we all know, well all DID’ers do, that is a choice.

I appreciate your words. You are very uplifting and hopeful and maybe this post does need a bit of that so thank you for dropping some with us. It hasn’t gone to waste.

Moral of the story: there are positives and negatives to everything (however large or slight) and BOTH need to be expressed if you are wanting to educate the public about DID to give a fair picture.

This is such a thought provoking conversation for me and something I’ve given a lot of consideration to over the years. I really appreciated the way Bourbon heard me out and didn’t get defensive. I have such respect for that willingness to engage with opinions and difference. It’s not easy, especially when you’re already feeling hurt and unheard yourself. I see so much divisiveness in so many communities I care about. I’m coming to the conclusion that it is such a huge challenge to create and be part of healthy communities with diverse members because most of us have never experienced that or even seen it before. Many of the people I come across in my peer work are being abused or belittled by their communities, they are at the bottom of their family and friend social heirachies, low ranking at work or unable to work, isolated from people like themselves and suffering from the impacts of all of these things such as low self esteem, depression, and self hate – all of which are seen as personal deficits by the mental health system rather that social issues. I’m reading an amazing book The Still Point of the Turning World, written by Emily Rapp about her experiences having a terminally ill young child. She talks about her rage at being dehumanised and having her experience, and her son, treated as a case study, as an example of the worst possible thing that can happen to someone, something to make other people feel better about their own lives. She talks about life as a Dragon Mother, her description of the unique agony and priviledge of loving and caring for a dying child. And I think again of The Gap, of how many gaps there are. Of a world of people who are living and hurting, who are divided rather than united by those most human of experiences – pain, suffering, loss, loneliness.

Then I think about how fractious so many of communities of hurting people are. Love and acceptance start to be treated as limited resources that everyone’s in competition over. The division of people into the camps – people with problems/people who can help – dehumaises both groups as the helpers burn out and the ones with ‘problems’ never have the opportunity to recognise their own gifts of love and compassion. I see a lot of these kind of fractured communities, corporations that work on what is effectively a class structure – with separate facilities, entrances, work and rest areas for each level of client/volunteer/worker/management/upper management and strict rules about how each class is to engage those ‘above or below’ their own. I am at times contacted by hurt and angry members of other DID support groups who want to inform me that a certain member has been removed from their network for ‘faking’ DID or not having ‘real’ DID. I see a lot of hurt, angry, lonely people desperate for someone to reach out to them who alienate everyone who tries to. I keep coming back to an idea – that those of us who are alienated, alienate. Having experienced abusive communities, we reject new ones, or we rebuild new ones with the same imbalances and flaws we’re familiar with and just exchange the roles. It’s such a risk for everyone who feels hurt and disconnected, including me.

Then I think about the challenges of the entire issue of how we as a culture engage with diversity and disability. I’ve written before about whether mental illness is a disability. I drew upon two other communities to explore some of my ideas – that of the Deaf community and that Autie/Aspie communities. I have had brushes but not extensive contact with either groups so my ideas may be uninformed and ignorant – but that’s partly my point – the impressions those of us who have little contact with the communities develop are based party on the most vocal peers who have engagement with the media (and partly on the media itself but that’s another post). So, in this conversation with Bourbon, am I the equivalent of a person with a disability who is not suffering because of it, accidentally drowning out the voice of a more vulnerable person who IS suffering and who desperately needs better supports and resources?

I’ve wrestled with many of these things on this blog – the tension in trying to be seen as a whole person in The Disability Tango. Challenging conventional and sanitised stories of recovery in Recovery is not a one-way street. The risks and usefulness of using labels to describe behaviour and vulnerabilities in Labels – helpful or harmful? About my ambivalence about the way mental illness tangles good and bad experiences together and the way mental health is presented as being ‘normal’ in Mental health needs better PR. I’ve also done my own getting really angry about the limitations of diagnosis and how DID is understood and presented such as Introducing DID brochure and unplanned rant.

So, what is my role? What is a responsible way to present DID? How do I make sure that the voice I have is being put the best possible use? How do we build diversity into the stories we tell about conditions and experiences? I do a few things already – such as whenever I give a talk about DID or dissociation or hearing voices (and so on, or facilitate a group) I love to present with another peer worker whenever I can, and for preference I like to choose someone who has a really different experience from me. I presented at TheMHS with Cary and we deliberately wrote our ‘my story’ experiences to highlight the ways in which we were different (eg. I’ve never been in psych hospital, Cary has had many stays; I find gardening grounding and hate the gym, Cary kills plants by being in the same room with them and runs every morning almost without fail even if she’s injured). I try to write a ‘People with DID are not all the same’ paragraph into every resource I create and explore some of the common differences to reduce the impact that the way my system works has on people’s idea of what ‘normal’ DID is. I love to do as much community consultation as possible when I’m working because so many other people have experiences or ideas I would never have thought of and I learn so much all the time. So that’s a start.

To this other topic – does me talking about DID as if it isn’t all about suffering help or harm other people with DID? As far as my own life goes – it just has to be authentic. I can’t pick an ideal ‘outcome’ and try to pretend my life story speaks to it, anymore than it’s fair to try and force an exhausted and overwhelmed peer worker to try and give messages of hope they can’t currently believe in. All we really have is honesty, as much of it as we are willing to share with each other. And for me, DID is a disability in that it is something about me that is different, for which I need care and support and room to function to the best the way I do. This is a little bit like the difference between creating prosthetic legs that are designed to look as normal as possible and help people fit in and help other people feel comfortable, and designing ones that look and function very differently to a human leg, but allow the person to run marathons. And that’s still coming from a DID is a deficit caused by trauma – model, which doesn’t fit everyone’s experience.

There is profound suffering for many, many people who have DID. The level of stigma for this experience is beyond anything else I have seen in mental health. When a psychologist was in the year long process of diagnosing me, I spent most of that time arguing and trying to convince him I had Borderline Personality Disorder instead. For any of us who know about the extreme prejudice which which many people with BPD and their families are treated by the Mental Health system, this should shock you. I’ve written a little more about this over at the DI page Why are we needed? My people, people like me, are in terrible pain, suffering appalling stigma and discrimination, living in secrecy and fear. Largely ignored and unacknowledged by the wider community and mental health system, people are stuck, in pain, and dying.

So why don’t I equate DID with this suffering? How can I be so indifferent to it? Because correlation is not causation. I do not believe that this anguish is a necessary result of having DID, while at the same time I acknowledge that it is the painful lived experience of many people. A massive amount of this pain is about trauma. Another massive amount of is about stigma and disconnection from community. And the last huge whack of it is about DID systems that are modelled upon dysfunctional communities. This is where my work comes in especially, because the framework we are currently provided to understand DID is, in my opinion, dangerously limited. People are being told they ‘must’ have an inner self helper. People are being told they CANNOT get ‘better’ without 5 years minimum of weekly therapy (and that if they can’t get it they are just screwed). People are being told that having parts means they are sick, that hearing voices means they are sick, that wellness is about being ‘normal’. People are being told that dissociation cannot be cured. People are being told that DID is all about suffering.

We know that there are issues with people living to their labels in DID as in other things. I don’t believe that DID is inherently about suffering, and I don’t believe that people are well served when this is the story we tell. The DID story is deeply tangled with that of suffering but I don’t believe that collapsing the two together helps people. I was utterly incapacitated by these ideas when I was newly diagnosed. I started off very gung-ho once I accepted the diagnosis – I was going to be one of those rare, wonderful patients who did everything right and progressed through therapy at a spectacular rate and was integrated and back studying my psychology degree in a year. I was terrified that most of the DID autobiographies I read ended with people still in a massive amount of pain and unable to work or keep their primary relationships etc. I was tied up in knots by the insistence on a ‘host’ or ‘primary’ or ‘core’ person and the way parts kept getting shuffled into a hierarchy when that felt so so wrong for us. I was scared and alone. I really wished I could talk to other people who had the same things going on, even better to talk to someone else who was maybe a bit further along than I was, maybe a little less scared. I decided to out myself and become a peer worker so that I could try and be that person for other people, to humanise and reduce fear – others’ fear of us, and our fear of ourselves. To some extent, choices I made such as refusing to give out a system map or let anyone know our individual part names was because we now perceived that the standard approach to DID was now the greatest threat to having the kind of life we wanted to lead. Where once that threat was experiences of abuse, it was now the treatment. We grasped onto the lifeline guy’s phrase – ‘A Grand Adventure of Self Discovery’ and used it to navigate every ‘treatment’ offered to us. When ‘trauma recovery’ treatment was more agonising than the original trauma we walked away. When ‘mental health’ was presented as a greyland of limited emotional range and hyprocritical superiority over all the other ‘sick people’ we built our own ideas about health and recovery. When DID was presented as the worst of all possible disorders, impossible to navigate independently, needing extensive treatment from experts, a humiliating, painful, and protracted process of recovery, we asked ourselves is this how we want to spend the next ten years of our life?

What I keep seeing is that when people are supported to find their own paths, instead of being fit into boxes, amazing things happen. I see people who get to have experiences of healthy communities and model their internal communities on those principles – love, fairness, diversity, respect – and these people are not suffering because of their DID. I keep seeing that when people are exposed to ideas about freedom and joy and community, where they are not alone any more, healing and hope can occur. I think that it is extremely important to make room for people who find the psychological model that DID is a mental illness and that they suffer from a disorder, useful and helpful to them. But there are so many people who don’t find that approach helpful, who get hampered by the illness model and can’t find hope or joy or relief from pain when their parts are presented as symptoms of a sickness, that I can’t use this framework in my peer work. Like telling people who’ve had two psychotic episodes they have ‘schizohprenia’ and will suffer from it for the rest of their lives – it’s not only inaccurate it’s such a disservice to the person.

If we struggle against the effects of stigma, if we build better resources and community responses to trauma, if we try to prevent abuse, if we create and model healthy inner and outer communities; I do not believe suffering has to be the lot for people with parts, or that not having parts any more is the only way to not be in pain. Pain is part of our lives, and how we understand it, the stories we tell about it, and the way we respond to pain as communities make all the difference in whether that pain consumes and destroys people, or can become one aspect of lives that are still rich, deep, meaningful, and connected. The same goes for disability, for illness, for trauma, for DID, for anything and everything that opens a Gap and challenges us to find ways of bridging it.

And now I have to run off and give a talk Supporting Someone in a Dissociative Crisis. Wish me luck. 🙂

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

Working on my talk about dissociative crisis

Nov 9, 2013Nov 13, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I’ve got 20 minutes to talk at the World Hearing Voices Congress about supporting someone through a dissociative crisis. It’s happening in a couple of weeks so I’ve been working on it recently. I met up with Bridges co-facilitator Ben, and we nutted through some ideas until it coalesced into a coherent framework. I love that process. I tend to need to bounce off someone else to think clearly and plan something like this. There’s such a sense of satisfaction about taking the amorphous and ephemeral and being able to find some kind of underlying theme or order to them.

When I asked other people about what they find helpful or not helpful when they have been in a dissociative crisis, I got exactly the answers I was expecting – which is to say, a very high level of contradictory responses. At first this seems hopeless – it’s so much easier to be able to give a straightforward answer – if A, do B. This is the medical model – if infection, give antibiotics. The nature of what helps with dissociative crisis is highly individual, so much so that what will be of great help to one person will make another drastically worse.

But it isn’t hopeless. Many people who have these kinds of experiences are able to be very articulate about what will and won’t work for them. One of the simplest things you can do is just to ask and invite information. If the person is a stranger to you and not able to give you any of that information, there are still many things you can try, within a framework of useful principles such as those of Trauma Informed Care. Having a broad understanding of the kinds of things that people may find useful gives you a bit of focus for a trial-and-error approach with someone in crisis, so I’ll be going into those.

I’m giving this talk free here in SA next week for everyone who can’t attend the conference. Here’s a link to the flyer with all the details. Feel free to share it around, it’s aimed at everyone, staff, people with dissociation, family and friends. You’re welcome to come along. 🙂

Edit: Update, this talk has been postponed due to illness – new dates will be provided soon.

Presents for littles

Oct 25, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Rose got us a gift! 🙂 Some of us who are younger like rainbows, one of us used to be called ‘The Rainbow girl’ back when she was young too (she’s grown up now) but we like rainbows still and like the rainbow pony. We have three of them now, two are little toys and this one is big. We have a whole toys and crafts and figurines box at our place by our bed with colouring in books and lego and things like that. It’s so nice!

I need a drink

Oct 13, 2013Oct 13, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Today was hard. I want to use a lot of swear words but I’m being censored internally. Working a lot lately, trying to keep up with some big new work opportunities, that generate a hell of a lot of admin for us. So my life is currently gigs and admin with the occasional housework and sleep. Nowhere near enough sleep.

If we have the excitable ones out it works okay, they thrive under pressure and work like dogs. Today sucked however, it was freezing cold and wet. It was supposed to get warm and sunny but didn’t. We left our jumper home, so slowly chilled through the day. This is not at all good for pain levels with the fibromyalgia. Due to the weather there was hardly any work, which is emotionally exhausting. You’re on display the whole time and have to stay cheerful and friendly, even if the occasional nutty person treats you like scum (why is it some people think face paint should always be free?). There’s always some wonderful people which is usually enough to make the day worthwhile. But a 5 hour shift, very cold, in a lot of pain, for very little pay, and an hour and a half driving either side of it after a previous two days of work, pain, and sleep deprivation was too much today.

I also got into a conversation with someone who thinks face painting is easy money, and someone else was clearly a bit confused that I find the drive home really hard. It is so depressing some days to deal with the chronic pain and invisible disability, to be held to standards I can’t meet. More than depressing sometimes, triggering. We were rocking quietly the whole afternoon, a major warning sign, we’ve learned the hard way.

Between lots of coffee and more food than I wanted to eat I was able to get back down the freeway without having to slap myself on the face to stay awake like I had to the previous week. I got to Rose’s place where she was just waking up after her night shift to put on some dinner. We crashed into a shaking, weeping, exhausted, nauseated mess. It isn’t helping that Rose and I are both working hard and at different hours so most of the time we spend together one or both of us are trashed and sleeping on a couch. Dinner was beautiful, I’m so lucky to have a girlfriend who’s an amazing cook. Rose napped and I watched the box feeling like I had a javelin in my back. Crashed into a weepy conversation which was badly timed and going nowhere good, switched, played around a bit before Rose went off to work, then went hunting an open bottle shop because sometimes too much sobriety is bad for your health.

Adelaide is lousy for that, at only 10pm nothing was open except for a bottle shop in North Adelaide, which turned out to also be shut but hadn’t bothered to update it’s hours online. So, I came home with 4 litres of milk and a bag of salt and vinegar chips, which wasn’t what I had in mind. At home I raided my liquor supply, which considering my hopeless liver severely restricts my drink intake, is in pretty good shape, and decided the evening would look better through the bottom of a large glass of black sambuca and ice.

I was right. I’m now in bed, wearing an old jumper of Rose’s, with a kitten, watching Dirty Harry. I feel pissed off and sore, but a hell of a lot more stable. Nobody will be cutting tonight. Boots firmly on the ground.

Where does my psychosis come from?

Oct 6, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

7 weeks ago I had my first adult experience of psychosis. I was extremely fortunate in that I knew what was going on, and was able to find enough strategies to manage it that it passed comparatively quickly. For the next several weeks I felt very vulnerable, on the edge of that place. I felt dissociated, and mildly paranoid. I had a strong feeling of being watched at all times, or of having someone behind me. At times it was stronger than that, the sense that I was standing on the lip of a hole in the fabric of the world. I was looking at reality, but just behind me was a tear into the void, dark and cold and terrifyingly inhabited. I could feel a cold wind on my shoulders.

I was still in a highly sensitive place, where certain things would speak to me in a way I wouldn’t usually experience. At a party a few nights later, a song comes on that has a guttural male voice singing and it’s like that moment in films where the background suddenly seems to zoom into the foreground without displacing it. The sound of the deep voice is reverberating in my body and making my hair stand on end. I go outside where I can’t hear it well. My hair settles back against my skin.

For the first few days I stay in the light, keep all the houselights on all day and night, and do not leave the house after dark. I do not drive, I do not work, I’m just patient. I test how things are developing gently, try turning out a light and wait to see if the hallucinations return. I find that I exist in a twilight state for a few weeks were the dark is mostly empty, but sometimes starting to fill with hallucinations. Being driven home by Rose, I’m watching the sky curiously as night falls, relieved when it’s empty, cautious when things move within it.

A few nights after the episode I’m lying in bed, talking on the phone, and the conversation is becoming increasingly stressful as Rose and I don’t see eye to eye or understand each other. I feel a sense of a charge rising in my body. It reaches mass and my sense of self suddenly dissolves, like a drop of oil onto a vast surface of water. I have no sense of my body, of gravity, of weight. I have no sense of being the right way up or even what way that is. I feel vastly infinite and utterly tiny at the same time. There is a consciousness at the center of a galaxy of stars like dust. I am falling in every direction at the same time. I close my eyes, knowing that I am still only a woman, still lying in bed, speaking on the phone, having an argument with my love. We keep talking. We find a place of connection and common ground. I feel myself come back together, like big bang in reverse, silent and without violence, all the stars gather back into my skin.

Gradually it eases, this sense of being suddenly skinless, on the edge of this world and another one. I’m so fortunate. How many people even know what psychosis is when they have their first experience of it? More than that – know what might help, know that it’s temporary, know that I can survive it? I re read a book I own called Unshrinking Psychosis by John Watkins. I recommend it for anyone seeking to better understand psychosis. Two ideas stand out to me – that there is method and meaning even in madness, and that not all psychosis is a breakdown. Some is a messy restructuring of the mind, a transformative process. Not breakdown but breakthrough. Not indicative of problems or stress or failure, but of growth, process, recovery. This resonates with me.

I also reached out to a mentor who has also experienced psychosis and we went out for coffee. The chance to talk with someone else who has been there – and come through it, sans lifelong complications, diagnosis, medications, and stigma, is such a relief. I ask one question in particular – “I felt so lonely in that experience, was it like that for you?” They tell me – “Lonely is not a strong enough word for the feeling of profound aloneness and alienation.” Yes. That’s how it was for me. They remind me – crisis is nothing more than the interruption of a pattern. For good or for bad.

There are things I understand better now. I understand the tremendous distress of people who’s sense of reality has collapsed when we try to tell them the things they perceive are not real in an attempt to comfort them. This is not reassuring. We are trapped between our psychotic perceptions (which may be terrifying, or not) and an awareness that we are going mad, which is absolutely terrifying. Knowing that the experiences are not real does not stop them happening to us. It’s like being trapped in a nightmare from which you cannot wake. Knowing it is not real does not stop the fear or the horror, in fact the sense of disconnection from everyone else, from the ‘waking world’, to push the metaphor, is terrifying. And we don’t know if we will wake up. So we cannot come to harm physically unless we act upon the psychosis – when the terror was so intense that my skin was literally rippling across my body, the effort it took to stay still and not run – blind with terror, through any obstacle and into any terrain, took everything I had. Even if ‘it’s not real’ means I can’t come to direct physical harm, I can certainly suffer psychological trauma. ‘It’s not real’ reminds me of the dissociative process of a child being sexually abused – not physically harmed, but violated and traumatised, who thinks to themselves ‘If I pretend this isn’t happening it cannot hurt me’. We know that’s not the case, that these experiences impact and change us even if we deny them. The experience of psychosis impacts, changes, and even traumatises us, even if ‘it’s not real’, because experiences that invoke terror, horror, helplessness, and isolation always have the potential to be deeply traumatising. The emphasis on it’s not real, don’t acknowledge it, the focus on getting over it and back to life, sealing off the experience as quickly and completely as possible seems like a highly dissociative process to me.

And there lies a dichotomy in my experience. It was not real, and yet it was real to me. More than that, it had a sense of profound significance and meaning that I am still gently examining. There was a sense for me of the indelibly familiar about an experience that was at the same time, utterly alien and new. Talking with my support people I drew upon many seemingly disconnected threads of my life that all had some link to this experience. I remembered my vivid imagination as a child where I could perceive things that other people did not – particularly at night. Foxes that ran up and down our hallway, soft footfalls on carpet and the brush of coarse fur against my legs, but not the musk of the real animal. The shadows that congregated in our lounge room every night, tall as adults, having meetings, talking among themselves in a murmur of voices that was the soundtrack to all my childhood nights. If disturbed, they would rush as one furious mass to wreak some unnamed horrifying punishment on any child out of bed. Some nights having crept out for a drink of milk I would be trapped in the triangle of light that spilled from the open fridge, waiting for dawn to come so the shadows (which could not move into the light) would go dormant. (waiting for the dawn to come – so many sleepless nights where only dawn soothes me to rest even now) My wild imagination made me stand out as a child, but not so much that I would have received any kind of psychotic diagnosis. I was different but not that different. I wonder sometimes if all children are naturally psychotic – and yet aware of the divide between the real and ‘not real’ that they perceive: imaginary friends, ‘pet tigers’, games. Somehow we lose this with age.

Another link; making connections with younger parts in my system (I have DID) has been a frightening and fascinating process. It has been hard for those of us who are older to permit our inner kids to have time out in our body. For some of us, it’s painful to be misunderstood as being childish. For others, it’s frightening how vulnerable inner children can be, and how lonely it can be to be a child in an adult body. A few months ago a very young part came out to play with a my little pony toy. They ‘flew’ the toy around the room. We were co-conscious for the play. What was absolutely startling was the physical response in our body. It reacted as if we were flying. Muscles tensed and relaxed, electric sensations feathered across skin, with the highs and lows of the flight the stomach flipped like we were in a car going fast into dips and rises on a road. When the adults switched back out, they were blown away to have this glimpse of a child’s world again. Children, or least, my inner children, have an intense empathic bond with toys that allows them to experience what the toy does. It’s outside of anything I have felt as an adult. No wonder children can play for so many hours. No wonder I struggled to not lose this ability myself as a child, playing games with younger and younger children as my peers lost interest in imaginative play.

A few months ago I was playing a game with friends that relies on imagination. Called Beyond Balderdash, you have to quickly invent plausible definitions of words and other cues. I find these quite challenging, not least because being a creative person, I’m expected to be very good at games like this and the pressure interferes with my thinking. For the first couple of questions I wrestled with my brain, trying to come up with original ideas and mostly drawing a blank. The struggle was fruitless, like trying to use a hammer to thread a needle. Then I felt a shift inside me, something wrestling with me and wanting me to get out of the way. I relaxed and let the process unfold. I stopped shaking my brain in frustration, trying to squeeze a creative answer out of it. Suddenly ideas came out of nowhere, easy as reading off notes someone else was handing to me. There was no struggle. My imagination just spoke. I thrashed everyone else at the game, and went to bed that night feeling thoughtful and a bit confused. It almost felt like cheating, the way Eleanor Longden describes her voices giving her the answers to an exam and wondering if that was cheating.

In my arts practice I’ve also been experimenting with something curious. When I’m doing something like painting, for me it’s a very intellectual process of calling to mind the shapes and colours I want to create and then doing my best to get my hand to make them. I’ve noticed at times that while doing this, I can ‘see’ an image on the canvas (or paper, or skin) that I’m painting on. It’s not really there and I know that, but I can still see a faint ghost image of what I’m trying to create. And it’s often different from what was in my head – maybe only in a small way, such as the placement of an eye, but it is different. So sometimes I ignore what I was trying to paint and I paint the image I see instead. Again, it feels oddly like cheating. The strange thing is, it’s surprisingly effortless, and it almost always looks better than what I had been going to do.

I think about sculpturers describing their process as being seeing what is in the stone and setting it free, rather than turning the stone into something. Rather than a quaint turn of phrase, this concept now startles me.

Nightmares that have been so deep, involving, and horrifying that my sleep became a place where I was helpless and tortured. And yet, a sense that in them in something powerful and important that I would be at great loss without. Memories of being so afraid of the dark as a child and young person that there was a sense of being on the edge of running, and that if I ever allowed fear to overwhelm me and started to run there would be no stopping and no safety ever again. An incident as a young person where I briefly hallucinated a nightmare figure when trying to confront my fear of the dark and had a panic attack. The experience of sensory dissociation and trauma so profound that I craved touch to ground me back into my body and sense of self. My desperation to experience psychosis as a highly traumatised young person who could not escape the daily pain of things like chronic bullying and alienation at school. And yet, curiously, I failed, and at the time, reality remained immutable.

Separate and yet connected experiences. Many of them, like threads all leading to a complex tapestry I now seek to understand.

I understand now the rage I felt in some people at the last Hearing Voices conference I attended. At the time I recoiled from it, wanting to walk a gentler path of diplomacy and peacemaking. But, sitting in my bedroom wracked with terror, on the edge of needing crisis support and knowing how profoundly traumatic that ‘support’ would likely be, I felt the terror and fury of someone marked for abuse and helpless to prevent it. The sense of safety of being at the edge of conversations about appropriate supports and responses to psychosis was stripped away. I was no longer a ‘voice of reason’ on the sidelines. I was now naked and vulnerable and under the microscope. The knowledge that simply being honest about my experiences could see my most basic rights taken away from me in the name of protecting me, could see me drugged and locked away, trapped and confined, subjected to solitary confinement, forced into therapy with people who use entirely different frameworks from me, horrified me. The instinct for self preservation said – silence. Secrecy. Be small, quiet, hidden, and run a long way away from the places where people like you are kept under guard, sedated, tied to the bed, given intense directives and advice by every nurse, doctor, and shrink, most of which is contradictory. So instead, I blogged.

I should be able to call a place like ACIS and tell them about my drug allergies and DID and trauma history and explain that I need a quiet place to rest for a few days and just enough sedatives to help me sleep without sending me into liver failure. The liklihood is that I would be abused and ignored as a faker, or committed, dosed on meds I cannot tolerate, and then find myself trapped in hospital in a spiral of drug induced psychosis and forced ‘treatment’. A system that is both over and under responsive to crisis, that has ‘entry and exit’ problems – it’s hard to get into the system and get help, and also hard to get out again. There’s rage in me that this is the ‘help’ available to me – high risk, and likely as traumatic as it is helpful. What I need is Soteria, a place of safety and respect, where people who are neither afraid of me or my experiences hold my hand while I rest, find my feet again, make sense of things, return to my life.

There’s not just chaos and loss here. Psychosis has been like being tipped up into my own subconscious, filled with wonder and stuffed with nightmares that breed in the dark. I refuse to live in fear of my own mind. There’s powerful things here, about life and love and art. If the alternative is the loss of those things, is the ‘flatland’ of a life that does not move me, of art that is forever the imposition of my will upon things around me, instead of a conversation with my own shadow, then I’ll risk a little madness.

When I was a child, my Mother believed fantasy and imagination were powerful and important. Creativity is essential to life. One of her friends believed they were dangerous. Her children were not permitted to watch the films we watched, or to read the books we read. Their play was shaped in ways mine was not. I wondered, after this experience, if they were right. Has being exposed to fantasy made me more vulnerable to losing my grasp on reality? Or has it left me better equipped to navigate my own inner world?

In the hearing voices group I’m involved in here in SA we often talk about our inner reality. Instead of conversations about reality and delusions, we talk about the shared reality and the inner reality. What I experience in psychosis isn’t real. But it is real. It is my reality, drawn from my mind and my life. Full of the promise of connection and art and a deeply felt life, as well as nightmares and terror. Of embracing child parts and making sense of trauma and facing my demons.

I’m back on my feet at the moment. The dark is empty, I can walk through life without music or images speaking into my heart and calling up a flood. I’m scared, and angry, and aware of a new gap between me and people who don’t experience this, and another reason I am vulnerable to stigma and ignorance. I’m also thankful, thoughtful, listening to the world with one ear cocked towards that void. I will go where my heart wills and seek the deep truths of the soul. Fray into stars and become a person again.

Poem – Voices in the Night

Sep 26, 2013Feb 15, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I wrote this yesterday, after driving home from a full, wonderful day of Tafe, excitement, and visits with friends. I often crash and become depressed at the end of days like this, this time a conversation happened inside on the drive home and a different part came out instead.

Home, through rain and night, after a day
Bright with people, the suns of their hearts, warm company
My house aches ahead on the road, cold and empty
And I feel the chill in my chest
Heart constricting, streetlamps
Pierce me with white knives
Rain falls like swords, and on the road
Black water pools like mirrors and
the night gathers close around me.I’m afraid
yes
To be alone
don’t be
I’ll catch you falling
It hurts
yes
it’s also beautiful
why does the light have to go?
because this is where the art lives
I love the people, their voices, my voice
I know. I love the silence, the strength in solitude. We walk both worlds.
Will I come back?
always
am I loved?
always
let go, and the fear will ease
yes
burrow down in my heart,
this dance is mine.

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Countering DID myths – we’re not all the same!

Sep 24, 2013Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 8 Comments

In my recent post Common DID myths, I spieled a stack of common misperceptions I’ve encountered that bug me as a person with DID. It got a lot of interest from people, with the odd misunderstanding or uncertainty about what I DO think about DID. To go through each point alone would be a huge post, but I can counter a bunch of them in easy to handle groups.

If you’re new to the topic of dissociative identity disorder, there’s a great, easy to read introduction here, or a shorter brochure version designed to be an easy place to start when educating other people – you can tailor it to your own experience by sharing the ways it does and doesn’t fit for you. I wrote these a few ago, back when I was starting out on my journey of being a peer worker coming out about having DID myself. Since then, I’ve learned a lot and my perspectives have changed in some ways. These days I’m far more interested in talking about multiplicity (an experience) than DID (a mental illness)… rather the way that that organisations like Intervoice talk about hearing voices instead of schizophrenia. Why? Because it takes the conversation away from the medical model. It moves us away from needing experts to tell us what is going on with ourselves. (not that collaboration with other people isn’t very helpful!) It moves us back into being the expert in our own lives, where our own opinions, experiences, and ideas matter. It stops pathologising all these experiences – did you know that a lot of people hear voices that are not distressing, cause them no harm, and that they have no other symptoms of schizophrenia?

Plenty of people with multiplicity have been diagnosed with DID or DDnos (which is the grab-basket diagnosis for people with major dissociation things going on who don’t quite fit into the diagnostic category of DID) and that’s great, and I work a lot in the mental health system where DID is what we talk about. But for me, it’s important to separate experience from diagnosis, and to remember that not everyone with that experience fits or identifies with the diagnosis! Read more about my thoughts on the relationship between multiplicity and the diagnosis of DID on Introducing DID Brochure and unplanned rant!

One the biggest issues with misunderstandings around multiplicity, as a lot of people pointed out, is the absolutes! Everyone with DID does this, or needs this, or feels this way, or recovers like this… So the first thing I do believe is this:

People with DID are not all the same

There are many spectrums within DID that vary widely from person to person, and also within the same person at different times. Some common ones I’ve come across are:

Degree of amnesia – some people have no idea what has happened when another part is out. Some people are aware of things while they are happening, or get updated after they have happened. This can be different at different times – I have a lot more amnesia when I’m stressed. It can also be different for different parts, some may always be aware, some may always be amnesiac within the same system. For more information see what is co-consciousness.
Obviousness of switching – for some people it is obvious when they switch, for others it is so subtle that only someone who knew them very well might be able to tell. My switching would be obvious if I allowed it to be a lot of the time, but years of keeping it hidden mean most people do not pick it. Some people are more sensitive to subtle switching than others.
Number of parts – this can range from just two, to hundreds or more.
Nature of switching – some multiples switch all through the day, others only very occasionally, and some people never switch, but they talk to their parts and hear them in their mind, or see them as people outside of themselves.
Degree of internal control over switching – some multiples can chose which part is out, others have no control over this. Sometimes some parts have more control than others, or can set up triggers to deliberately switch – eg. I will wear certain clothes and bring certain foods and smells with me to make sure my researcher stays present during exams.
Degree of fluidity – some multiples have very fixed systems with, say, 5 members who have been there for years and have not changed at all in age, self identity, or roles during that time. Others are more fluid, they are difficult to learn about as they are constantly changing with new parts forming and old ones going away. Neither of these is necessarily better than the other – fluidity can be chaotic, but rigidity can prevent growth.
Other diagnoses – people with DID may have other physical or mental illnesses which will change how they experience life.
Degree of impairment – some people with DID are extremely unwell and struggle to function, perhaps spending a lot of time as inpatients, while others live and work unnoticed in the community, perhaps with no one around them aware of their condition.
Degree of separateness between parts – some people’s parts are closer to each other in the sharing of psychological space, they can do things like share tasks in the body (one running the mouth and eyes while another chops food for dinner), merge and blend skills, feel each other’s emotions – eg. a content adult is enjoying their evening, until they start to be disturbed by a growing feeling of anxiety that seems alien to their own mood – because an inner child is distressed by the movie and their feelings are blending across, or influence each other mentally such as giving or taking away words in their mind, showing images to each other, and so on. Other people have parts who are completely separate and share no common psychological space or resources. Both within the same system is possible too.
Polyfragmentation – some people with DID have mini systems within their system, or have parts who have themselves split to form parts of their own.
Degree of diversity within the system – systems can form with parts who are extremely similar in personality and nature, or extraordinarily different. One system may have 5 parts all called Geoffrey, all somewhat shy, introverted guys who hold different memories and range in age between 35 and 50. Another system may have highly diverse parts who identify at different places across a spectrum of gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, species (some people have parts who identify as being animals, spirits, fae etc), and so on.

DID is about identity – it is therefore extremely individual in the way it presents and is experienced!

This is contrary to all the myths based on absolute assertions, such as

People with DID can’t work.
Everyone with DID has an inner self helper, an inner protector, an inner wounded child (and so on).
People with DID are manipulative.
People with DID can never control their switching.

These myths are often perpetuated by people who have had some kind of contact with the multiple community, rather than the set I come across when speaking to people who have never heard of DID. Humans do seem generally to be wired towards absolutes, and you’ll find myths based on absolutes abound in most areas of human endeavour. All lesbians are vegetarians, all Indians like cricket, all domestic cats hate water. They are true some of the time, or even lots of the time, but they do not capture everyone’s experiences.

What particularly frustrates me is that so many of these myths are embedded in our resources. Throughout many of the books about DID, and the frameworks about working with DID given to us by the ‘experts’ are absolutes. These people should know better. I’m sick to the teeth of reading books that tell me things like all people with DID have an inner self helper (a very useful type of part who knows a lot about everyone in the system). What they actually mean is all people with DID I’ve worked with have an inner self helper or, if I’m being particularly cynical; having absolutes makes me less anxious about working with people so I strongly encourage all my clients to present their DID to me in a way I’m comfortable with. That is harsh – as people we are often unaware that our absolutes don’t include someone until that someone tells us. The problem is that when a whole stack of people agree on an absolute like this, it creates a culture where people who don’t fit are not invited to share their experience. If that culture becomes rigid and deeply embedded, then people who don’t fit will be ignored and excluded even when they do.

I get angry about this because I work with too many people who are stressed and scared that they don’t seem to be fitting the frameworks they’re reading about or that their therapist is working from. Frameworks are really valuable!! They give us direction when we feel lost and hope when we feel overwhelmed. But I believe that holding any framework too tightly, or trying to force a framework into a situation or onto a person when it isn’t fitting and when it’s creating instead of alleviating stress is wrong and harmful! Some people don’t get stressed, they just exit the supports. They maintain their own sense of identity and truth, alienated from the community and unable to access the services if they ever do struggle. This is not a good thing.

Lastly, I think some of these myths about absolutes are basically Black-swan fallacies. “Every swan I’ve ever seen is white; therefore; there are no black swans”. I read a lot of these in the literature. All DID is caused by trauma. All DID is formed before the age of (pick one) 10, 8, 7, 5, 4, 2. All people with DID need extensive therapy. People with DID never spontaneously integrate. These are based on the experts not having witnessed anything else – but that does not mean that anything else isn’t possible. In fact, considering that you are not permitted to self identify as having DID (because that is self diagnosis and therefore lacks validity, a claim I’d be more comfortable with if I believed any form of diagnosis had much in the way of validity), then research is never going to include people who haven’t had contact with the mental health system, so there is actually no way to hear about things like people living with DID who don’t use therapy. In some cases, the limited way the diagnosis of DID has been constructed contributes to these fallacies – for example there’s a case study in Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman (Chapter 4, The Syndrome of Chronic Trauma) about a woman who was a political prisoner, who describes a degree of internal splitting as an adult – “My second name is Rose, and I’ve always hated the name. Sometimes I was Rose speaking to Elaine, and sometimes I was Elaine speaking to Rose. I felt that the Elaine part of me was the stronger part, while Rose was the person I despised. She was the weak one… Elaine could handle it.” I’m not saying Elaine developed DID, but this experience of parts, some degree of multiplicity, gets excluded from conversations about DID, and I think we need these.

These types fallacies are being exposed in the field of psychosis as space has been made for more people to join the conversation. So much of what we think we know about hearing voices is based upon the experiences of people within our mental health systems. Many people who hear positive, helpful voices or only briefly hear voices do not tell anyone. Why? Because of absolutes such as ‘everyone who hears voices is mentally ill’. They’re not invited to the party. If they do turn up, they’re offered a label, a diagnosis, a straightjacket, and all their thoughts and ideas from here on out are delusional, unless they agree with their treating doctor, in which case they’re insightful. Through the work of mental health activists – both of the peer and expert kind, new parties have been created where people get invited to share and amazing things are being learned – like LOTS of people hear voices, many voices are not distressing, some voices only become distressing when people are counselled not to listen to them, and that different people find different approaches best.

If we keep talking about DID and multiplicity using absolutes we are excluding so much of the diverse experience and wisdom of our own members. There IS common ground – people with DID have parts – and generalisations can be useful: people with DID often get frustrated about having to explain our condition to everyone, people with DID feel scared and isolated when we don’t know anyone else with DID, people with DID want to be believed and accepted. I believe that people with DID are a highly diverse community, with many different experiences, ideas, understandings, and ways to live life most fully.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

Common DID myths

Sep 22, 2013Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 16 Comments

I was asked today by email if I’ve encountered any common misconceptions about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Where to start I wonder?? Here’s my reply:

We’re all serial killers.
We’re all dangerous.
We cannot be trusted.
We are liars.
We are attention seekers.
We are all messed up victims with nothing to offer anyone else and no capacity to function without extensive support.
We are so weird, different, and bizarre that we are basically aliens, utterly unlike other people in any regard.
We are psychics, in touch with the spirit world and merely misunderstanding our gift and thinking we have DID instead.
We are gullible vulnerable people our shrinks have implanted with the idea that we have DID. (see Is DID iatrogenic?)
All people with DID are the same. (See Multiplicity and relationships)
DID is only ever the result of the most extreme, inhuman, unimaginable child sexual trauma you can possibly think of.
All people with multiplicity lose lots of time. (See What is co-consciousness?)
People with DID can’t work.
Everyone with DID has an inner self helper, an inner protector, an inner wounded child (and so on).
All people with DID should integrate.
Integration means you are now ‘well’ and all your problems go away.
The goal of every person with DID is to become a normal person.
DID is basically just a complex way to try and avoid your problems.
DID is just a way to avoid taking responsibility.
DID is just an excuse to be lazy and confusing.
Everyone has DID.
People with DID are extra special people who are nicer, more intelligent, more creative, and more wonderful in every possible way than all other people.
People with DID are all conscientious and loving and would never hurt anyone.
People with DID are crazy.
DID is the same thing as schizophrenia.
DID is the same thing as PTSD.
DID is the same thing as BPD.
People with DID have ESP and other otherworldly characteristics.
People with DID can never recover.
People with DID are impossible to work with.
People with DID are manipulative.
People with DID should pick one stable part to be out all the time. (See Parts getting stuck)
People with DID are merely under the delusion that they have alters.
People with DID always have a ‘real person’ and a bunch of alters.
If you hear voices inside your head you have DID, if you hear voices through your ears you have schizophrenia. (See Parts vs Voices)
It’s not possible to have DID and psychosis.
If you have lots of parts you have less chance of recovery.
Switching is always really obvious.
It’s always easy for other people to tell the difference between parts.
If anyone you knew had DID it would be easy for you to tell.
Alters always know who they are. (See Multiplicity – Mapping your system)
Alters always have a complex back history of their identity.
People with DID can never control their switching.
People with DID always know they have it.
People with DID are always in control of their switching. (See Multiplicity – switching and relationships)
People with DID make each other worse if they spend time together.
People with DID only get better in therapy.
People with DID never have any other challenges (disability, poverty, discrimination on the basis of sexual or gender orientation etc).
All people with DID are white, straight, cis women. (See Another coming out)
DID is always formed when an abused child imagines that the abuse is happening to a different child instead.
People with DID never spontaneously integrate.
People with DID who integrate never split into parts again.
People with DID always have lots of parts.
DID is the worst thing you could ever wish on someone.
DID is caused by things other people do to you. (rather than your response to those things)
DID is all about pain. (See I am not Sarah)
You either have DID or you don’t, there’s no spectrum of multiplicity.
If you have more than one diagnosis, you are sicker and weaker and less likely to recover.
All people with DID are going to recover horrific memories of traumatic events they hadn’t been aware of.
People with DID understand each other in far deeper way than a singleton will ever understand a person with DID.
DID is an adaptive gift and never really causes any problems for anyone. (See Adaptation and Control)
People who say they are DID are just trying to get out of a crime.
The United States of Tara is an accurate representation of all people with DID. (See my review here)
People with DID have to be careful not to encourage or allow their parts to become any more separate than they already are. (See Multiplicity – Is naming parts harmful?)
Parts will always hate each other. (See A poem conversation between parts)
Most psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors know a lot about dissociation and DID (See DID Card)
There’s lots of good resources for people with DID
It’s easy to find quality, reliable information about DID
Most therapists are willing and capable of supporting someone with DID
Carer supports don’t need to be tailored to the experience of loving a person with parts.
People with DID are the most unwell, challenged, vulnerable, and needy members of any family or group. (See Caring for someone who’s suicidal)
Regular mental health services are appropriate and good supports for people with DID.
People with DID should all be locked up away from the regular community.

Yeah, I know I changed first to third person. I’m tired, and you get my point. I don’t think the list is complete, that’s just off the top of my head at the end of a long week. Have any to add?

Edit: Just to be very clear that I’m presenting all these ideas as myths. I don’t agree with any of them. The links in the text are to other posts I’ve written that explain why not in greater detail, and what I do believe instead. I think that maybe reading such a big chunk of myths, particularly very common ones, perhaps it’s more difficult to remember I’m presenting then as myths. I think I’ll put up a counter – post where I summarise what I do believe about DID…. Watch this space! 🙂

Countering DID myths – we’re not all the same!

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

A year with Rose

Sep 11, 2013Sep 12, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

On this day last year, my girlfriend Rose became part of my life. We first met online and started dating shortly after meeting in person. She’s a beautiful, generous, complex person I feel very privileged to know and love.

Photo courtesy of Marja Flick-Buijs http://www.rgbstock.com/gallery/Zela

We’ve dealt with a lot over the year. We’ve both had health troubles. We’ve found ways to support and care for each other, to navigate the challenges of having two trauma histories and find joy in each other. I found myself reflecting upon a quote today:

Mama used to say, you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul.

Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days

365 days today. I’ve glimpsed a little and what I’ve seen moves me.

Dating as a multiple is… interesting. Different parts have different relationships with Rose. Some date, some are friends, some more like colleagues, or little sisters. Each takes time and effort to cultivate, each brings something different to the relationship. Where one is tender and nurturing, another is mischievous and energetic. There’s a lot of adapting, and a lot of talking things through. It takes an extra special effort to be honest and authentic. Friendship is the foundation.

We’ve been talking about moving in together for a while now. It’s exciting but also stressful. For both of us, we risk losing our secure housing in a gamble on our relationship lasting – or at least our friendship lasting. As we’ve both been homeless, it’s a very raw area. One thing adds a sense of urgency to our plans, which is that we both want children. Considering the challenges of conception in a woman/woman relationship, health concerns, and our desire to have settled into living together long before we start trying, there’s a certain keenness.

When I met Rose, she had been trying for a baby as a single woman. She’s been pregnant and suffered losses before, a grief that is still very fresh for her. I, on the hand, as a sick single woman approaching 30, had all but given up on my own dream of children. Last year I started reading books on grieving infertility. To my surprise, I was given a clean bill of fertility earlier this year. With Rose’s deep love for children, and my sister back in the country, my own health limitations no longer seem such an impediment. I visit my delightful goddaughter Sophie almost every week and fall more deeply in love with her. We’ll keep dreaming and talking, trying to find a balance between pragmatism and optimism.

Falling in love with Rose has been amazing, maddening, glorious, exhausting, healing, and deeply satisfying. She’s the first woman I’ve fallen in love with, and she’s been a gentle and caring partner, laying to rest my anxieties that perhaps I was mistaken in thinking I was attracted to women. I’m now very settled in my identity as bisexual, or queer. I’ve ended many years of choosing to be single, which was the right choice for me at the time. Being in this relationship has given me so many opportunities to grow and learn, and unlearn, to share and celebrate life. It’s been eye opening to realise how much difference it makes to have such support, little things like watering the garden when I’m ill, big things like supporting my efforts in business. We’ve made the most beautiful memories, that I’ll always treasure. I’m grateful and I feel blessed.

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Storms at Sea

Sep 10, 2013Sep 12, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Last night was fantastic. It was rainy and stormy here, squalls of rain, then cold bursts of wind… so Rose, my sister, Zoe and I went down the beach. It was wonderful. I ran around whooping like a madman to encourage Zoe to run. The waves were high, the wind biting. We drank coco from a thermos, ate slightly sandy strawberries, and Zoe dug big holes to stuff her head into.

I felt free.

A part came out a few nights back who hasn’t been here in a long while. She bonded to Zoe, cleaned the house, and picked a fight with Rose. The fallout has been oddly settling. I feel attached to my dog for the first time in a long time. There’s affection when I look at her. Rose and I picked ourselves up and sorted things out. A cold wind blew through my heart. I love my house. There’s determination that, stay or go, I’m going to enjoy my time here, make the most of it. There’s good memories here, there’s scope for more.

Time off has been good. Less work, more rest, more chance to spend time connecting with friends – by which I mean more than just being in the room with them. Spring has walked through the windows and changed the colour of the light and the smell of the air. There’s a fierce joy in me suddenly, burning strong. The desire to devour life, drink deeply, inhale, crack the bones, run in the storms.

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Coming home is sad

Aug 26, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Home, and it hurts. Somehow I pick up right where I left off. The unhappiness is so driving and intense. I’ve hauled myself out of a deep pit of self hate/self harm/depression so that a shaken Rose can head off to her night shift without panicking about me. It was good to be gone for a few days, like being able to breathe. None of this. Home again and within a few hours I’m almost hysterical with distress. I’m trapped within conflicts I can’t resolve. I want to move in with Rose, now that she’s working 2 days and 3 nights a week I have no weekends with her anymore, just a couple of nights here and there, and I hate it. I want to be there when she gets home, I want to sleep close even if we have no waking time together. I want to be near to help when she’s sick, to be able to reach out for her when I am. I also don’t want to give up my secure public housing unit. The conflicting needs there feel like I’m being torn apart. I love Zoe, I am deeply invested in her and appreciate how much easier she makes my life when someone with quite bad PTSD feels safe home alone despite homophobia and vandalism in my neighbourhood. I’m also exhausted by her. I can’t keep up with her needs, not only the high energy but the need for contact. I can’t sleep away from home because she becomes distraught if she’s left out at night. I can’t dry my washing at home because she tears it off the line and chews holes through it. I love my home but I can’t garden because she digs up or eats all my plants. I can’t sit out the back anymore because she has destroyed my chairs and even my aluminium table and umbrella. I can’t garden the front yard because my neighbours harass me and people steal from me. I am so desperately tired of thinking through the issues of owning her, resolving them, then putting it all back on the table when something new comes up with her because I am desperately unhappy and something has to change!

That dangerous combination of emotional exhaustion and frantic unhappiness where half the decisions that seem right at the time you will regret once you’re through the bad patch. I hate it, I hate all of it.

It was good to see my poets again. One of them has died since I last met them. I have his book in my collection of poems. This trip I bought another book ‘Strands’ by Barbara Di Franceschi. It’s beautiful. She writes

you hold
my feelings
in paper boats
afloat
in this music

Barbara and I talked about the virtues of self publishing poetry and retaining control over your own work. Another poet asks where the books of my poems are. Another project in the works I tell him. When I get home I reach for the book of the departed poet. I’m captured by the idea of leaving something behind me. On the long dark drive back I talk with my sister about the project, how it might work, how to lay it out and make it work. I think about what I’m already doing every week and try to work out what I could drop to do this instead. I think about how much work this blog is and try to work out if it’s worth it.

Part way driving home the phone reception returns and a DI facilitator reaches out to discuss something about Bridges. I suddenly can’t catch my breath, my stomach drops, I’m shaking. It takes an hour to feel myself again. At home that night to beautiful Rose and a house full of pets there’s gifts to share and photos to show. Urgent admin requires attention and I manage it for a couple of hours without crying. ‘I hate myself’ starts up in my head. The next morning I’m up after not many hours sleep to go and face paint. I’m exhausted and stressed trying to find a place my map doesn’t recognise. I wish I wasn’t working and nothing makes sense to me. I pull it off and come home tired but pleased with myself and my art. My home is a horrible mess. I’m chilled and a chest infection is starting to develop. I find clean socks but they collect grime and pet hair from the floor so quickly I put them in the wash basket and go to sweep the house. The dog howls pitifully when left outside for only a few minutes while I sweep. The sound makes me want to scream. The kitten tracks kitty litter all through the house. There’s nothing fresh for dinner. I just want to put on a pair of warm socks (all in the wash) or failing that just socks, and clear the dining table. An hour of cleaning later and I’m sobbing on Rose’s shoulder. I have so much to do and I can’t manage it. I hate my house and my life and myself.

I still haven’t contacted college to wrap up the mess of last semester with all the illness I suffered, or arrange new classes. My life feels precarious. One wrong move and I’ll shatter everything I’ve built. Some days I feel secure, some days I feel moments from disaster. Some days I can’t feel anything, just a bitter numbness. I don’t recognise anyone or believe anyone cares about me. My friends seem distant and I’m swamped in raw pain and can’t connect with anyone. I feel ruined. There’s a sickness upon me, a worm in the apple. I hold myself tight because it seems that if I breathe, I will lose everything and everyone. Where once I endured hard long nights alone, suddenly my pain is communal, affects many people, spreads like a disease.

I drive to see Rose, she’s crashed in bed after a night shift. It is complicated and takes forever, car keys are lost, roads are blocked, I’m increasingly frantic and exhausted until I finally accept that today, nothing will work my way. Hours later, sleepless and spaced out I turn up at her house with two $2 burgers from a fast food joint. Her flatmate is away so I have the rare opportunity to visit while in a vulnerable place. I creep into bed with her and we sleep in each other’s arms, holding hands. The agony dissolves. A younger one is finally able to switch out and breath for a little while. We stay there all day, sleeping, dancing up the hallway in socks, and nest in front of the tv. Rose has to go back to work. We stay until 3am watching sad tv shows, Wallander, Without a Trace then drive carefully home to Zoe, trying not to disturb the equillibrium. The night is empty and we’re grateful. Zoe sleeps outside the door. We crash to bed and sleep for 11 hours. The world turns, and we’re still alive.

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Speaking at the World Hearing Voices Congress in 2013

Aug 16, 2013Aug 25, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’ve received an email to say that my paper “Supporting someone through a dissociative crisis” has been accepted as a 20 minute talk, and I’ve been asked to create a poster form of “About Multiplicity” for display at this years World Hearing Voices Congress. Hurrah! You can read the abstracts I wrote here. The conference is being held in Melbourne in November. I’m really excited to go again and meet up with some of my amazing online friends. I’m feeling isolated here in SA and I really need the boost – I need to spend time with other people as passionate about mental health reform (and, perhaps, as cynical about the effectiveness of mainstream services). I need to feel part of a worldwide movement. The last time I was able to attend a Hearing Voices conference it had a profound impact upon my mental health work. Because I’m not part of a big organisation I can feel very alone at times. It makes me incredibly sad to see the same myths and misinformation over and over again, to hear the same stories of shaming, alienation, and indignity. It starts to feel like moving a desert with a sieve.

I’m feeling more and more settled about the job choices I’ve been making this year. Crazy as it seems to be focusing on a job in the arts world, it’s easing a sense of exhaustion I’ve been feeling about mental health/community services work. I still care passionately about these fields, but building a home in arts to make a difference in the world feels like a much better fit than trying to build a home in the world of mental health, at least for now. It’s not like mental health is going anywhere… I’m tired of working in such a conservative, conventional sector. I’m tired of being the outlandish one. In art I don’t stand out so much for being alternative. I don’t feel like I’m working so hard to function in an environment that’s basically alien to me. I don’t have so many arguments about boundaries being too harsh, and the need to treat people as equal humans.

Rose says I often come home from peer work shattered. I tend to come home from a day face painting in pretty awful physical pain, but otherwise elated. There’s a joy in it for me that’s very simply about creating something beautiful and making people happy. For now, that’s good enough for me. I’ll work and save to send myself over to Melbourne. I’ll keep the DI Inc running as best I can, with the various groups. And I’ll keep looking after myself.

Abstracts for the World Hearing Voices Conference

Jul 16, 2013Aug 25, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Later this year this amazing conference is being held in Melbourne and I’m determined somehow to go. Last year it was in Cardiff, and I had an abstract accepted but was unable to fund the trip. I’ve just submitted this bio and these three abstracts… wish me luck. 🙂

Bio

I’m a poet, writer, and artist living with ‘multiple personalities’. I’m co-founder and chair the board of non-profit organisation The Dissociative Initiative. In the past few years of work in mental health I’ve been developing peer-based resources, facilitating groups, and giving talks and presentations about dissociation, trauma recovery, and voice hearing. I’ve also been a full time carer for others with ‘mental illness’. I’m passionate about creating alternative frameworks to that of mental illness and reclaiming madness as valuable.

Voices as parts: Understanding multiplicity and other dissociative experiences

Dissociation is often misunderstood and ‘multiple personalities’ is seen as rare and bizarre. Some voice hearers are struggling with dissociative issues and/or experiencing some of their voices as parts. These are commonly interpreted as psychotic experiences and can be confusing and distressing, such as the sense of being possessed. I will share some of my personal experiences of how dissociation affects me, what it is like to have voices that are parts, and strategies I have used in my own recovery. I will also share a framework for making sense of the array of dissociative experiences, including multiplicity. My experience has been that multiplicity is a spectrum, and I will explore common forms of multiplicity we can all relate to in a non-sensationalist way. I do not locate these experiences within the ‘mental illness’ paradigm, but nor do I minimize the suffering they can cause. For people who hear voices that are parts, there can be additional challenges to recovery such as conflict over control of the body. Parts can present a voice hearer with an additional threat to their sense of identity, and their exclusive right to determine the course of their own life. I will explain some basic principles of working successfully with parts and living as a multiple. I hope to inspire people to feel more comfortable and confident in discussing and navigating dissociative issues, and encourage people that it is possible to live well with voices who are parts.

Embracing Diversity – Life as a Tribe

I will share my experience of living with voices who are parts – from confusing childhood issues, diagnosis within the mental illness paradigm, to my current passion for peer work. A personal sharing of my own movement towards greater understanding and self-acceptance, and my rejection of the mental illness model in favour of “a grand adventure of self discovery”. I’ll share sad and funny life stories about multiplicity that will help people better understand the experience and reflect upon their own identity growth and relationship to community. Drawing upon my skills in the creative arts I’ll share some of the pain and joy of life as a tribe. This talk will invite audience questions and welcome friendly curiosity about the nature of multiplicity.

Supporting someone through a dissociative crisis

Despite the psychiatric tendency to divide experiences into discrete categories, we are becoming more aware that experiences such as anxiety, psychosis, and dissociation can commonly occur together. We now have Mental Health First Aid training offering suggestions to support people through various common crises such as a panic attack. However, few of us know how to recognise or support someone experiencing a dissociative crisis. I will discuss common experiences, an understanding of triggers, and the role of trauma. Common problems for people with parts in crisis will also be touched upon such as major internal power shifts, abuse between parts, vulnerable or child parts getting stuck ‘out’, and chronic cries for help. Harmful coping techniques will be explored in the context of an attempt to manage and gain control over these experiences. I will demonstrate how to understand and map these harmful approaches, such as alcohol abuse or self harm, in a way that opens up many other possibilities for effective grounding techniques that are individual and specific. The protective role of dissociation will also be discussed, and the need at times to trigger or increase dissociation both for safety and to make possible deep emotional renewal.

About Eating Disorders

Jul 11, 2013Jan 19, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

There’s more than one way to get an eating disorder. Eating disorders are another mental illness that, to my mind, are poorly defined or understood, often mis-characterised and stereotyped, and far more complex than most people realise.

The DSM has a truly bizarre way of classifying eating disorders, with single symptoms such as weight or menstruation sufficient to bounce you out of one category and into another – and back again should those symptoms change. I don’t find this useful at all. I prefer not to use the clinical terminology and the irrational clusters of symptoms. I prefer to talk about food and body issues. This is a big category, there are many different ways these issues are expressed, and many different reasons people find themselves struggling with these issues. Our classic perception is a young woman starving herself because she fears getting fat. This is real, it happens. But the field is so much broader than this too, and the complexity of people’s distress so much more than we, as a culture, really understand.

The categories I find most useful are simply descriptive of behaviour or compulsions. Some people are not eating enough. Some people are eating more than enough. Some people are purging what they eat. A lot of people are doing two or all three of these. So we have restricting, binging or overeating, and purging.

These issues are prevalent! They are under-resourced – in SA we have only 2 inpatient hospital beds to support people with eating disorders – for our entire state. In my work as an ED Peer Worker I have often discussed and supported people to travel interstate to Victoria or Queensland for inpatient treatment as the wait list here is so long. We recently also lost our free counselling service for people with eating disorders that was running through Women’s Health Statewide. And yet, Eating Disorder are significantly on the rise in our population, and they carry the highest mortality rate of any of the mental illnesses. The risk of suicide is high, and the physical complications of disordered eating can be severe.

But the community perceptions can be appalling. It is assumed that people who restrict food are the most ‘serious’ and have the ‘real’ problems, whereas some studies have found that the mortality rates are actually highest for those who have a mixed condition. These people may not appear particularly underweight or unwell and as a result may not be taken very seriously. When resources are scarce, these are not the people who find themselves prioritised for treatment. The common myth is that people with eating disorders are vain young women who need to wake up to themselves. The reality is that anyone can struggle with disordered eating. The shame around these issues mean that most people struggle in secret, they feel deeply distressed, they lie to those closest to them and find their relationships cracking, they are infuriated with their own ‘weakness’, they internalise all the cultural myths about being weak, selfish, self-involved, vain, and useless, and they find themselves struggling in quicksand and going down.

I haven’t come across one ‘classic’ presentation of a person with an eating disorder in my work. I’ve come across a whole range of reasons people find themselves struggling with these issues. Most of us at some time in our lives will find ourselves struggling to maintain a healthy relationship with food. For most of us, fortunately, this will be fleeting. We’ll struggle for awhile then settle back into good routines again.

For some of us, we get stuck. We get stuck in different patterns and for different reasons. Some of us are deeply concerned about weight gain and desperate to be thin. Some of us have severe food issues but don’t own a set of scales or count calories. There are many different ways that an eating disorder can start, and many different reasons people can find themselves having struggles with food. Distress in areas like body image isn’t always in play, and it’s a terrible dis-service to people to not believe them – or have anything to offer them, if their food issues have a different cause. Here are some commons reasons people can have major issues with food:

Body issues such as a desperate fear of gaining weight, pregnancy, menstruation, onset of puberty, and so on. These can be very complex and arise out of other struggles with life, relationships, and self.
Obsessive compulsive issues, for example around issues with germs, or extreme religious fasting.
Developmental or neurological challenges, for example only eating foods or a certain colour, or having nutritionally limiting requirements about texture or patterns of eating.
Psychotic issues, eg refusing to eat for fear food has been poisoned, or contains microchips.
Pica – the appetite for non-food substances such as dirt.
Mania changing the appetite. Some people eat voraciously when manic and do not feel full. Others forget about eating entirely. Some people do a bit of both in a binge starve cycle.
Depression changing the appetite – see mania.
Anxiety issues. When someone is afraid, the body goes into ‘fight or flight mode’ and directs energy away from non essential areas like digestion. People with chronic anxiety may find they are not hungry, have dry mouth or heartburn, and feel sick or involuntarily purge if they make themselves eat.
Dissociation issues. Chronic dissociation can blunt sensations such as hunger. People may not dislike the idea of food, they may simply be unable to feel hungry and forget to eat. It can also blunt the sensation of fullness so people may overeat or binge. For some people overeating or starving to the point of pain triggers dissociation in a way that is soothing.
Multiplicity issues. Some parts may not ever eat, so if they are out for a long time the body starves. Some people have difficulty with many parts coming out over the day and all of them eating, or none of them eating. It can be difficult to coordinate things like food intake if there’s a lot of switching and a lack of communication or co consciousness.
Self harm issues. Binging or starving to the point of pain is a way some people inflict pain on themselves. Denial of food or forcing unpleasant purging can be a method of punishment or self torture.
Abuse issues. Some people disconnect from their bodies following abuse and find the idea of caring for it and feeding it appropriately very alien and difficult. Sometimes food is part of abusive behaviour or strict punishments, where it is withheld, or a child is forced to eat when they don’t want to, or forced to eat food they dislike, overly hot or unpleasant food, or non food items. This can lead to enduring patterns and problems with food.
Addiction issues – for some people food issues are part of a broader pattern of addiction and difficulty with regulating impulses.
Drug issues – many prescription and recreational drugs alter the appetite or metabolism.
Social issues such as isolation, bullying, or domestic violence can disrupt healthy eating patterns and a good relationship with yourself and your body, or can lead to extreme weight management as a perceived solution eg. a preteen boy teased for being chubby may focus on starving and weight loss as a way of preventing bullying and gaining social acceptance.
Grief often changes eating patterns for a while. Some people go on to struggle with food or their body in the longer term.
Health problems – any number of physical conditions can affect your appetite, energy, metabolism, sleep patterns, and digestive health! Physical conditions can also link into other issues, so what started as vomiting due to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, may become purging as a way to manage chronic anxiety. Nausea, pain, digestive problems and appetite changes should always be investigated rather than assumed to be psychological.
Psychosomatic distress, where food or digestive problems are part of a bigger picture of emotional distress, for example involuntary purging that settles down once other major emotional stress is reduced.
Attachment issues. For example children who have experienced huge stress such as being moved into the foster care system may have an unusual relationship with food, stealing or hoarding it, refusing to eat when watched, keeping food that has gone bad, or binging when food is available.

These difficulties can also tangle together, so someone may be struggling with a combination of thyroid issues, a recent bereavement, and long term self harm issues, all of which is presenting as disordered eating. The most useful approaches for some of these concerns is quite different from others – there is no one size fits all cure. But having said that, my experience has been that the basics behind the Recovery Model and Trauma-Informed Care were a good fit for most everyone no matter where they were coming from. People were all different – some were in denial about their food intake and I spoke with deeply distressed family or friends instead. Others were very aware of how wrong things had gone for them and desperate to find a way out. Some people were at the start of their struggles, others had been fighting a war for years. People wanted to be heard, and to be treated with respect. Those who were not struggling with body issues were desperate for someone to believe them that weight was not their focus. People needed to hear that they were not weak, vain, or pathetic. They needed to hear that there was not one way out of an eating disorder, but that there is a way out!

I asked a question of almost everyone I was in contact with in my role as an Eating Disorder Peer Worker, which was – “Have you ever met anyone who has recovered from an eating disorder?” Almost everyone had not. To me, this is huge. People need to see that other people have recovered. We need to be able to meet them, read about them, learn from them. We need to see there are roads out, and not one road but many! We need to be given the freedom to try different roads, different approaches, techniques, and frameworks so we can find our own good fit. We need to talk to people who get it. We need a way out of shame and isolation.

We really do deserve better. We deserve easy to access, good quality supports that understand issues with food can be complex and arise for many different reasons. We deserve clear information about these reasons, access to peers in a safe and supportive way, and the opportunity to try different approaches. I’m frustrated and distressed that this is not the situation we are in, in large part I believe because the community perception, and therefore the perception of funding bodies, are two commonly believed myths – that eating disorders are just about vanity, and that people with eating disorders never get better anyway so there’s no point in funding services. Rubbish!

If you or someone you care about has an eating disorder, I’m sorry. You deserve a lot better. But, there is hope. All over the world, people are navigating their distress without amazing services. People who hear voices are escaping the clutches of hospitals and talking to each on the internet about how to cope instead. People with PTSD are running their own support groups. People with sensory issues as part of mild autism are discovering they’re not alone. You can seek therapy privately, read books, reach out to recovered/recovering peer workers, and fumble your way through to your own needs and solutions. You are not alone. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You are stronger than you realise. You deserve a good life. You can recover.

Multiplicity – Rapid switching

Oct 20, 2012Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

‘Cascade switching’ is a term I coined after watching someone with multiplicity do an incredibly rapid series of switches over the course of a conversation. I’ve experienced it only a few times myself and I really hate it. Multiples are very different from each other when it comes to things like switching. Some switch frequently, some very infrequently. For some multiples switching a few times in a week would be highly unusual. For others switching a few times an hour is quite normal. I lean more towards the latter. It’s quite normal (hah) for me to switch all through my day, even if one is mostly out over a week, others will tend to peek out here and there, even if it’s just a young one noticing the jar of cookies in the cupboard or being distracted by little kids running around on tv.

Cascade switching is something else. It’s switching so fast and so frequently that it feels and looks something like shuffling through a deck of cards face up, almost too quickly to register what’s on each card. I’ve noticed that it seems to have been triggered in the cases I’ve seen by huge news that impacts everyone in the system (eg news of a death in the family), by encountering a situation that no one in the system can handle, so the switching just speeds up and becomes chaotic, or, as in my case, by the start of a new relationship. I’ve also done this when I’ve been under threat in dangerous therapeutic relationships.

It’s deeply unsettling, I’m switching from one sentence to the next, or even part way through sentences. My ability to track information is overtaxed by the chaos, and breaks down. We can’t tell who is out anymore, what we were doing, who we are with, even what year it is. The dissociation becomes overwhelming and I feel like I’m drowning blind and can’t even tell what way to swim to get to air.

For some multiples this is a common occurance. Their systems are highly fluid, parts constantly changing, disappearing, new ones being formed. Their experience of life is so chaotic and dangerous that their system doesn’t settle into a stable pattern but stays in a state of turbulence. Stability hasn’t served them for survival so they gear towards flux instead. These people are often not diagnosed as multiples because the DSM concept of DID presumes stability.

I’m settling down finally which is great. It’s been a few weeks of cascade switching with the occasional stable day or evening around my girlfriend, but that’s settling more into my usual patterns of at least having someone out for an hour or so. Not to mention that’s making it a bit easier for her to work out what’s going on or have some capacity to predict how I’ll react to her. I’ve been trying to unpick what’s driving it for me and I’ve been able to pin down a few things. One is that most of my system are keen to meet her. Another is anxiety about forming a ‘one-part bond’. Most of my friendships used to be this kind of bond, a few still are – where the connection is only to one part and no one else in my system thinks of that person as a friend, or even recognises them. (this makes life awkward when you run into people unexpectedly, that blank confusion that always makes me feel broken and ashamed) This is not what I want, because we are all parts rather than entirely separate people, we are all missing information about our life, and also missing skill sets. We are vulnerable to bad dynamics and painful relationships when only one part is involved and making decisions. We make much better decisions as a team. For a really important relationship like a romance, it’s even more crucial that everyone in my system is aware, involved, and has a voice in what’s happening. That doesn’t mean that the kind of relationship is the same with all the parts, but that there is a relationship of some kind being developed. So I think anxiety about that has been pushing up the switching – whenever one part is out for a while and things are stable, the anxiety spikes and the switching amps up. The downside is that cascade switching is so stressful and confusing that it’s very difficult to navigate a relationship with someone in the grip of it.

Pacing seems to be helping me get out of it. The obsessive focus you feel in a new relationship is delicious – you want not just to be with them all the time, but to climb under their skin, into their mind, investigate and submerge yourself… But the dating, the meet and part and meet again cycle is helping me settle back into my own cycles. Making the effort to keep the same part around for an hour or the whole night – then making the effort to have another part who wants to connect or communicate be present next time, we’re slowing down and things are becoming clearer. Trying to find a middle ground between adapting to another person where switches are triggered by how they are and what they need, and the kind of switching we do alone where they are entirely generated by our own needs… that’s a huge challenge! I can do one or the other, but trying to meld something between is a complex ask. A whole new kind of dance.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

United States of Tara

Oct 9, 2012Jul 13, 2016 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

I’m often asked what I think of this show, and it’s not an easy question to answer. It’s a highly divisive topic in the multiple community and I’m always mindful of very strong feelings for and against by a lot of people who feel pretty disempowered and marginalised already.

Personally, I’ve watched the whole show. As a television show, I think it works. It’s interesting and funny and thought provoking. It’s entertainment. I laugh through it. As a multiple and mental health activist passionate about multiplicity, I have mixed reactions. I love that everyone in Tara’s family has ‘issues’. She’s not the wreck in a perfect family. I love using humour to talk about big important issues- although I also recognise that for some other people, this feels painful and humiliating. Personally, I’ve plenty of funny stories about the complications of life as a multiple and I’m glad I can navigate things with a sense of humour. I like that they consistently treat the multiplicity as ‘real’ and show the confusion and distress of not having it treated as real. I think it’s good that there’s a clear childhood trauma link established. Raising awareness of the experience of multiplicity is a good thing.

But there are also things that deeply frustrated me about the show. I find Tara’s switching actually painful to watch. It’s hard to communicate how deeply uncomfortable it makes me, the best analogy I’ve been able to come up with, is to try and imagine how it feels to watch a close relative stripping… just… ugh! This representation of switching isn’t inaccurate, although it is misrepresentative. A smaller percentage of multiples switch like Tara, very obviously, to a small, stable set of highly recognisable parts. The majority of multiples switch covertly. The transitions are subtle and hidden from most people, or only occur when they’re alone/in therapy/with their closest friends. Making me feel uncomfortable is not a criticism, but what really bothers me is that Tara’s presentation of multiplicity is not put into a context. It wouldn’t have been difficult to write in brief interactions with some other multiples who have different presentations, whether she met them in person, read about them in biographies, or talked with them online. Presenting Tara as a typical multiple is frustrating for someone like me. I have to contend with the sideways glances as people try to catch me switch. I have been asked by shrinks or support workers to switch on demand. I also have to manage the typical reactions of people who are permitted to observe an obvious switch, which is usually fear and fascinated voyeurism.

This brings me to my next major concern about Tara. The show brings up some of the greatest fears experienced by multiples or by the general community about multiples. ‘Younger’ parts making sexual advances to a young person. Parts being killed off or disappearing. Parts who embody an abuser. A multiple who cannot be trusted to care for an infant. I’m not saying these things never happen, but when the public understanding of multiplicity is based on Tara, Sybil, and numerous serial killer movies, this makes me angry. This is not representative of multiples! I have never ever put a child at risk, been sexually inappropriate with a child, and none of my system are abusers, violent, sociopathic, or sadistic. Multiples watched this series, saw some of our worst fears brought to life, and we’re left without answers, without assurance, and for many of us, without any other resources or supports in our lives. I feel this is shortsighted at best and unethical at worst. So many of us are so alone, so afraid of ourselves, so stigmatised, labouring under books of rigid advice about how we should function, stuck with a medical model that construes multiplicity as a sickness, and treated by the wider community as serial killers and freaks. I think conversations and depictions of multiplicity need to be sensitive to this context, and to maintain hope, honesty, freedom, diversity, and respect. I think Tara starts this conversation but falls a long way short of the hopes I had for it as a resource and tool to advocate on behalf of multiples.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.