Poem – Curled into her arms

Jan 29, 2014Jul 22, 2015 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

From my Oct 2013 journal

Curled into her arms I laugh with joy
and the sound of it delights me, like a bell, like bird song
clear and pure and unrehearsed,
without audience or self consciousness,
she holds me and my skin
trembles in the candlelight, there’s a space
here within our arms, when we are breast to breast, where
darkness does not fall, for a night
or an afternoon
or a golden morning, I am without a past
no touch but hers, no memories of pain or blood or loss
we are shameless.

We are kites,
flying over all those burdens,
beyond the dark obsession,
the memory intruding,
the nightmares from which we wake
screaming, the cult of survivors,
the platitudes of therapists, the way
the social workers think they are being enlightened when they tell
us in the mandatory child safe courses that children who are abused
will never recover, the screams that
sound in our deeps,
that wait beneath our words, that we can hear
when we place ear to breast:
None of it is real.

None of it is a truth we have to live forever,
some days the knots slip
and the strings fly free, we dance
on the other side of darkness, we are
reborn, into innocence, love
begets freedom, phoenix from ashes
there is laughter in our bed
joy in our love.

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

Jan 20, 2014May 8, 2015 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

Anchor is a term I use to describe deliberately using a trigger to help me function. Triggers get talked about lot in various communities – those of us struggling with various forms of mental illness such as eating disorders, those of us working on recovering from trauma, and those of us with multiplicity. For an overview of triggers and a range of different suggestions about managing them, please start by reading Managing Triggers. This post has stories about using anchors to help manage anxiety, trauma issues, and other ‘mental health’ problems. Information about using anchors to manage things that trigger parts for people with multiplicity is coming in a couple of days.

Some of us just drown in triggers. Our world feels like a giant pinball machine where we are constantly ricocheting back and forth, never able to be still or to direct our own course. Some of us are not this chaotic, but we find our efforts to reach goals and build a good life get randomly capsized by triggers we can’t seem to get a grip on. Sometimes this sensitivity is something we can harness instead of trying to overcome. Sometimes the best way to mental health is to find and use the strength that’s hidden in the ‘weakness’ or vulnerability that’s overwhelming you. If being less reactive to triggers isn’t helping, maybe you can use your reactivity in a useful way. Sometimes the goal isn’t to stop feeling things, it’s to feel things that are helping you build your life.

That’s where anchors come into things. An anchor is a trigger you deliberately use or cultivate to help buffer you from the effects from other triggers. It’s strong enough to overwhelm the impact other triggers have on you.

Here is one of my old anchors:

Yep, it’s a bag of stones. But not just any stones, MAGIC stones! No, actually, just stones. Ahem. This started when a stressed younger part in my system stole a stone from a potted plant at our shrink’s office. It was something she could look at later, to remind herself of good conversations and a sense of acceptance that we experienced in that place when they seemed unreal and distant. It was a way of finding some Object Constancy. A few other stones were added later, such as one from the garden of the shelter we stayed at the first time we were homeless, as a reminder that we’d survived. They could be carried everywhere, tucked easily in a pocket or the bottom of a bag. They were tactile and comfortable to hold or rub with fingers. And they triggered something, they evoked a strong sense of connection to people, places, and times in my life. When I felt empty and hopeless, that sense of freefalling and disconnection, these anchors reminded me that all those things had really happened. They helped to connect me to my own life story.

I often use perfume as an anchor to literately and deliberately overwhelm my own hypersensitivity to the smell of strangers, which is a strong anxiety trigger for me. I’ve written about this before as part of ways to help manage Using Public Transport. Heightened senses can play a huge role in our sensitivity to triggers, and it’s common for people who have been traumatised or who have PTSD to find that certain senses seem to always be straining, very alert and very receptive. Instead of getting caught in the chronic hyperarousal, with all the frustration and irritability that a sense on high alert all the time can bring, why not see it as a superpower and use it to your advantage? For years the smell and proximity of strangers made public transport, crowds, shopping centres, and concerts almost impossible for me. I spent a long time trying to dull this useless, hypersensitive awareness, trying to make it normal again. I ricocheted between dissociative numbness and agonising sensitivity, flooded with sensation.

I finally started to realise that problem might also be the solution. Scents evoke memory in a powerful way. I once smelled a perfume that took me right back to my childhood, playing in the garden, so powerfully it took my breath away. I think my beloved elderly neighbour must have worn it. I have a bottle of it now myself. It’s very precious to me. When I smell it, I feel loved, and beautiful, and carefree. I started to explore scents. I bought an oil burner, essential oils, and books on how to create blends. I joined forums about fragrances, and discovered a whole world of people for whom scent is a complex ecstasy, people who visited perfume houses, who reminisced about perfumes now unavailable, who . I bought samples of strange perfumes from eBay and discovered that a heightened sense can be a source of delight. I grew fragrant plants in my garden and loved the way I could still smell them hours after brushing past them. I learned how to wear perfume as an anchor, to lift my wrist to my face when the smell of someone very afraid, when the odour of hospital cleaner, when the tang of blood overwhelmed me. Any Sensory Supports can function as anchors if you respond to them.

As a young person struggling in school, I used to carry my journal everywhere. It was one of my first, most successful Grounding Techniques, a place I could honestly express all the intensity that burned in me. I wrote myself into being, wrote myself through pain, back from the edge of self destruction, asked myselves questions and pondered the answers. Tried to make sense of my world. The actual journal itself became an anchor, a physical representation of all that writing meant to me. I could walk back into school with the weight of it in my bag. I held it to my chest like a shield. I used it as Artificial Skin when the world was unbearable.

When struggling with the overwhelming urge to self harm, one of my approaches is the Ink not Blood idea. In very bad times I have painted ink wounds on my arm and bandaged them, and that bandage has become an anchor, something to touch and hold, for fingers to worry at, a physical reminder of pain and of loving choices made when in pain. It is comforting in the way that a healing and tended wound can be comforting for some of us who struggle with self harm.

When I’ve written about managing chronic suicidal feelings, I’ve talked about things I use as talismans against death, things that keep me holding on.

They are my talismans against the dark, and they fail when the darkness is great. I hold one until its light goes out, then I put it back and take out another. The power of feeling suicidal is that it strips meaning from that which means most to us.

Some of these talismans are ideas or experiences or quotes or relationships. All of them trigger something in me, some courage, or hope, or acceptance. Some of them are physical things that could be understood as anchors. They are things that weight my soul in life, that help keep my boat here when the tide is pulling me over the edge of the world. The stub from a concert ticket. The peace lily my friend bequeathed me after she died. A poem on my wrist, or a Ray Bradbury book. A bag of stones. They are things that keep a good, healing story about my life alive for me.

Anchors are about taking your sensitivity to triggers and learning to use it, to hone it like an instrument and play beautiful music with it. They are not always the answer, they are not the only way to manage triggers, and they don’t always work. But they can be beautiful, turning what has been a curse into a blessing. Sometimes we live best when we embrace what it is to be human, to be vulnerable and moved, full of memory and feeling. If the only song triggers ever play in your life is the one of suffering, perhaps it’s time for some new music.

For more information about using triggers to support your mental health if you are multiple, go to Using Anchors to Manage Triggers – Multiplicity.

Awesome Quote – Self Care

Jan 7, 2014Jan 7, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Sometimes someone else says something to me that just clicks. Like a bell ringing deep in my chest, there’s a sense of connection to something I needed to hear. It will often stay with me for days, sometimes even years, and get woven into my complex personal philosophy of life, or trauma recovery, or community building, or whatever other framework I’m currently working on.

This one was by a friend and fellow peer worker with DID, who like me works a lot with other multiples. She was sharing how sometimes people get frustrated that she is able to function in the world – she has a home and a long term relationship and a job and all those things that both give and require stability. For some of us with DID, these can seem like impossible dreams. She said to me one of the things she tells them, if it’s appropriate is:

I can do what I do, because I spend a minimum of 3 hours a day on self care. When you do 3 hours of self care a day, you too will be able to do these things.

This resonated.

On one level, both she and I know it’s not this simple. Bad luck, abusive relationships, sickness, homelessness, and so on can all strip any person of the capacity to work full time or do many other things that need a lot of sustained energy and emotional stability. There’s more to recovery than self care, there’s also things like community, opportunities, and a decent dose of luck. Self care, like self love, often needs to be done in a context – we are better at loving ourselves when we are loved by others, and when we see others loving themselves too. Sometimes the first goal of self care is to find or create some spaces where we can care for ourselves without being attacked or belittled.

But on another level, this idea about self care boils down a whole stack of complex concepts to something incredibly simple. Are you getting what you need to function? Are you sabotaging yourself? Are you neglecting yourself? Are you trying to run on empty? Do you even know what you need? Are you waiting for someone else to do it? Do you wait until you crash and burn before being caring? Do you look after yourself, with your specific and unique needs, a lot, every single day? How do you expect to function if you don’t?

It was a powerful reminder. I have big dreams. I have big expectations of myself. I need to match them with a powerful commitment to looking after myself. That can’t be self care that would work for someone else. It can’t be punitive, traumatising, or harsh. It needs to genuinely be the unique things that support me. The kind of care and devotion I have learned to give to my pets and garden, applied to me. It may not be easy, but on one level it’s stunningly simple.

Nurturing

Jan 6, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

My garden is blooming and beautiful. I love it so much. A number of years ago, when I was extremely unwell with severe dissociation, I read the book Women Who Run With The Wolves, which I loved. One of the suggestions was to grow things, to touch earth and become accustomed to the cycles of nature, of seasons, of life and death, of the needs of things that grow. Since that time, I’ve always had a garden, even if it was only some jonquils in a pot. Many plants have a special link for me, remind me of someone I have loved, or a time in my life, or a dream I’ve had. I bought some of these plants last year to celebrate the news that it seems I have intact fertility and will hopefully be able to have a child.

When I started growing things, I found myself slowly learning things I had forgotten in awful circumstances. In the grips of profound self hate, nurturing my plants was a small but powerful reminder that things grow best when they are loved rather than starved.

There’s a certain stereotype of the young person who has escaped from an abusive background, who find themselves something to nurture – a house full of cats, a volunteer role at the local nursing home, or a garden full of plants to tend. Somewhere in that act, I gradually began to learn how to tend for myself. It’s a process I’ve seen many people go through, people with such amazing qualities of generosity, compassion, tenderness, or wisdom, who have not yet learned how to treat themselves with this kindness, but who pour them out on others in a tangle of love and need and hope. For others they’ve yet to learn how to nurture, how to help something to live, to watch for signs of stress, to learn the language of need for another. They have yet to learn how to be still and listen, the attentiveness of love.

I remember the very first time I grew plants from seed, what a miracle it seemed to me. How magic that from these small inert bits of brown matter, green life springs. The incredible fertility of life, that from one seed, comes a plant that creates many many seeds. That all things die. That some things that I thought would grow, under my care, will not, and others that are thought to be difficult grow readily. Despite all knowledge there is mystery, even in this. Gardens reward attention, knowledge, and skill; with beauty and abundance. These observations are so simple and yet I find them deeply moving. Standing with bare feet on earth, in rain, wind on my skin, hands in soil, I find metaphors for the tending of my soul, of my family and friends, my world.

I find a sense of peace and connection in my garden. I hope you have or find places in your life that speak to you also.

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.

Safe Sex 7 – Find Freedom

Nov 27, 2013Jun 4, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

Explicit but not graphic content.

Part of what helps to make sex emotionally safer is freedom. Most of us have a whole host of beliefs about sex that limit, bind, and cause us pain. We live in cages in our minds about sex, partly because of terrible experiences and partly because of cultural myths. There’s a lot of ideas that limit us – from the simplest linking of the experiences of sex and pain – experiences that one always leads to the other; to more complex constructs that bind and confuse us.

I was in a conversation once where someone expressed discouragement about differences between what they and their partner liked. Their idea was that keeping things ‘fair’ meant that both partners got exactly the same experiences during sex. So, if I got a massage so I have to give my partner one. This tit-for-tat system is an unnecessary burden. The goal is intimacy and pleasure for both! If what each partner likes is different there’s no benefit in inflicting something on the one who doesn’t like it! If I love a foot rub but my partner has madly ticklish feet then it’s just silly to feel obligated to give them a foot rub back. It’s not just okay to like different things, it’s quite common! And to like different things at different times – tonight I don’t feel like this, I’d prefer that, and so on. It doesn’t really matter what form sex takes or how different you both are in what makes you feel pleasure and closeness, as long as you are both feeling it.

Another example of freedom being important to emotionally safer sex; I was talking about sexuality and was surprised when a woman told me that she found women attractive and appealing but couldn’t be a ‘genuine’ lesbian because the idea of oral sex with a woman disturbed her. I do not believe this is the case. Sexuality is about who you want to have sex with, it doesn’t say anything about what you do and don’t like during sex. Misconceptions like this create cages that bind people. Our culture weaves different ideas in together to create a big knotted mess that people get tangled in. Lots of lesbians like oral sex. That doesn’t mean you have to, to be a lesbian! Some gay men are brilliant in the kitchen, that doesn’t mean all little boys with an interest in cooking are going to be gay. It’s fun to look at the clusters of experiences that commonly occur – gay men and fashion! But it’s harmful when these become the ‘norm’ and all other experiences get overshadowed. As a young person I knew a kid who was bullied a lot because he was the only straight guy in his drama troupe. Clusters become stereotypes, and people get trapped by them whether inside them or outside them.

The politics of sexuality is highly charged for many people. The language around sexual orientation, gender identity, the politics of sex and morality are relatively new to mainstream Western culture, and in many places are used as distinct categories rather than descriptive language. Language as a general rule can be very helpful as a shorthand way of explaining who we are and perhaps most importantly, if someone might be interested in you. 😉 Categories, where people get stuck in boxes and stereotyped, are often very destructive. There’s a cute ‘Gingerbread Person’ poster where Sam Killerman has worked to untangle these categories back into descriptive language – it’s not perfect, but I do love it as a starting point for seeing gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and so on as separate concepts that differ from person to person!

People can become scared of ‘what things mean’ about sex; if I like this does it mean I’m gay/straight/kinky/whatever? It can often help to realise that you are allowed to define yourself. Liking or not liking certain sexual acts does not determine what people or genders you like to do them with! Sometimes the political fighting about rights can chew up vulnerable people who are in the middle in a way that disturbs me. Nobody should be forcing or coercing you to publicly identify or privately see yourself in a way you find distressing, with the exception of holding people to account for ethical behaviour. This is incredibly important to me! On a personal scale this push to put people into boxes limits people’s ability to engage and accept their own sexual desires and lives because of fear of what it might all mean for them. On a public scale, bullying, isolation, and intense distress can result from our tendency to categorize people and assume that we know better than they do what is going on inside them. It’s a form of diagnosis and holds about as much water for me in social settings as it does in mental health.

In Dead Boys Can’t Dance , Dorais and Lajeunesse explore issues of homosexuality, stigma, and suicide. What I was most interested by is that the group of boys at highest risk of suicide is those who were straight, but designated as gay by their peers. These boys suffer all the stigma, rejection, and isolation of being seen as gay, and do not identify with the gay resources and communities who might provide some refuge from these experiences. The process of mis-identifying each other might be less distressing if such stigma were not attached to some of the labels, but I’d still argue that not being seen for who we believe we are, not being believed about who we believe we are hurt us. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the past 100 years of the gay rights movement surely it’s that this harms people?

Another area in which freedom can help us to make sex emotionally safer, is freedom from the cultural beliefs of what it is to love another person. We tend to value our relationships in terms of duration. Only those romantic partnerships that last until the death of one partner are ‘true love’. Only sex between partners in love can be ‘good sex’. Or alternatively – marriage (or monogamy) kills sex, and good sex can only be had between strangers, or casual partners. Many communities that prefer and normalise particular kinds of relationships and sex consider that only their kind of sex is ‘good sex’. (think of the sexual norms of polygamous Mormon communities, and those of the BDSM communities). People are highly diverse! Good sex for one person is another persons dullest evening ever, or even a nightmare. Relationships that had great sex still may not last forever, because life is challenging and people grow and change, and relationships need lots of skills as well as love to thrive. We don’t have to take on these ideas ourselves. Sexual plasticity is an amazing idea the scientific community is exploring. (see The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge) Briefly put, plasticity refers to our malleability, the way we change over time. Sexual plasticity is why we can find our partner deeply attractive at 20, and still deeply attractive at 50 even though they look rather different. We are to some extent, wired to change. Sometimes this works for us, sometimes we find it frightening or stressful.

Freedom from limiting cultural myths around beauty, about the superiority of youth, the way we de-sexualise people with disabilities or illness. Many mature people love to have sex, and do not deserve to be seen as ‘creeps’ or weird. (See blog and book Better Than I Ever Expected) Emotionally safer sex doesn’t just happen between the individuals involved, it’s a cultural and community concern. How to create aged care resources that respect sexual and gender diversity, and support romantic and sexual relationships? How to support ethical sexual behaviour for people with intellectual disabilities, or at least foster the recognition that many of us, whatever our other challenges, are sexual beings. How to break out of limiting ideas that great sex only happens between the ‘beautiful people’ as if ripped abs means someone will be a generous and wonderful lover?

There are so many areas in which freedom can support us having emotionally safer, and better sex. Sexual morality is a tricky one, in that engaging sex (and life) ethically is a responsibility of all of us. Determining what ethical sex is can be challenging. Many of us draw from our faith communities to help us decide moral sexual behaviour, and this can be deeply rewarding. But for some of us, their moral frameworks around sex are a painfully poor fit, leaving us trapped in self rejection or hypocrisy. Some of us have no faith community and are relieved by the sexual freedoms of Western culture, but also wrestling with our sense that sex should be engaged ethically and trying to find non religious frameworks for that. There’s more than one way of looking at sex. You do not have to be trapped between moral frameworks that are hurting you, and immoral sexual choices that also hurt you (and other people). Go looking at the ways other people and other communities frame ethical sex. This isn’t an easy road, and people’s deeply held beliefs about morality are sometimes nowhere more intense than around sex. For some of us, rejection and revulsion would be the cost of living more authentically to our own beliefs.

There is no right way of dealing with this. Each of us has to decide for ourselves what prices we are willing to pay to be connected with our communities. For some of us the much lauded ‘coming out’ would cost us everything, and we would be at very high risks of suffering violence or suicide. For others, anything but coming out is a slow death. We do not have to walk each others roads. But freedom can mean at the very least, freedom inside ourselves from ideas that make us hate ourselves. Freedom from being trapped into choices between a morality we do not believe, and abusive sexual acting out. Freedom can mean simply the freedom to know who we are and make our choices willingly, bear our burdens with love and not hypocrisy, and seek to help our communities grow into safer and more accepting spaces.

Perhaps one of the greatest freedoms we need to make sex emotionally safer, is freedom from shame. Brene Brown is a brilliant resource in this area, she writes about shame, courage, and imperfection. Here’s a link to a couple of her great TED talks about connection and shame, or watch it below:

Freedom is a key human need, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. It can come at great costs, and expose us to awful risks. It can be painfully vulnerable. It can ask us to deeply wrestle with our beliefs about love, morality, and relationships. It can also be healing, liberating, and deeply peaceful. I hope you are able to find freedom from ideas that are hurting you, to make peace with yourself as a sexual (or asexual) person, and to engage in sex and support others to engage in sex in ways that are ethical, loving, and emotionally safer.

This article is part of a series about emotionally safer sex. Try also reading

5 hours after an assault

Nov 26, 2013Dec 5, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 14 Comments

Rose and I were unfortunate enough to recently have to exercise all our ‘how to support someone after trauma‘ skills. We’ve talked about it and decided that it may be a useful story to share, in the hopes of helping other people better support their friends and family.

My lovely girlfriend Rose accompanied me to Melbourne recently for the International Hearing Voices Congress. I was given a full three day subsidized access to the congress, but we could only afford to pay for one day for Rose. So, on the Wednesday while I was having my mind blown in amazing talks, Rose was off roaming the city and seeing the attractions.

Rose and I are both passionate about social justice. Neither of us have had easy lives, we’ve both experienced abuse, homelessness, and poverty. We’ve both had PTSD. Rose was first homeless as a 13 year kid, and we both have a particular place in our hearts for other people who find themselves in that place. So, when she came across a guy who was living rough, she bought him a cup of coffee. She sat nearby to share a drink and a chat. And then things went bad. He grabbed her, manhandled her, and tried to kiss her as she struggled and then froze. It seemed like a long time before she was able to break out of being frozen and run away. She was alone in a city she doesn’t know very well, with almost no phone battery left, having a major trauma reaction as many other far more horrific memories and experiences suddenly flooded her.

This is not a nice story to tell, because it touches on prejudices and misconceptions. I want to name some of them. Firstly, the idea that homeless people are dangerous. Like people with mental illnesses (and the two populations have a massive overlap), people who are homeless, and especially those who are roofless are often treated with fear and revulsion. They become invisible, and can go days or weeks without another human being making eye contact, smiling at them, or touching them kindly, even when they live in crowded cities. This fear reaction can trigger exactly what people want to avoid – because being dehumanised alienates people. And alienated people often feel little empathy and a great deal of anger at communities that have rejected them. Homeless people are not more likely to be violent. It could have been the well dressed guy waiting at a bus stop, it could have been someone Rose thought of as friend. The latter is harder to imagine but statistically far more likely. Rose was doing exactly the right thing – treating a guy who was down on his luck like a person, and sharing a little of her good fortune with him. Things going wrong does not always mean you have done something wrong. And sadly, doing the right thing does not shield you from things going bad at times.

The other misconception people often have about an incident like this is around the freeze response. There’s a lot of complex science, neurology, psychology, and outright conjecture about the freeze response that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, it’s pretty common in both animals and people. If you want to read some more about it, try the blog Understanding Dissociation by Paul F. Dell and look for the term ‘tonic immobility’. I’d also suggest the works of Peter A. Levine. Here’s a quick overview of what I’ve found useful – there are (at least) five basic responses people have to a major life threatening event – Fight or Flight, Freeze, Fold, and the Tend-and-Befriend. Fight we all understand and usually people who fight in the face of something like an assault are applauded and appreciated. Sometimes if their fight response is intense or seen as disproportionate, they are instead lynched. The flight response is also pretty self explanatory and again, there’s usually a pretty warm reception to people who have been able to escape something awful by running – and even those who tried but didn’t make it. After that, things get less clear. Tend and Befriend is about the intense bonding and banding together for survival that people can do when faced with severe threat. It’s often an overlooked response to threat, and not often framed in the more ‘heroic’ light of the fight or flight.

Lastly, we come to freeze and fold. These are the two responses that culturally carry the most baggage. People are rarely applauded for having these reactions, and sometimes the reaction itself is viewed as evidence the trauma was not particularly bad, or even the fault of the victim. Freeze is an extremely common response to threat. It’s difficult to predict, and even people who have previously never frozen in response to a threat can be surprised to find themselves doing so. Freezing often predicts a much rougher time after a trauma (by which I mean a higher incidence of PTSD), which personally I suspect is at least partly the result of the cultural shaming around the freeze response. Freezing can be life saving in some situations. Some animals escape predators that leave them unattended, thinking they are dead. Animals who have frozen are often numb; unafraid and unresponsive to pain. If an animal cannot escape, this is a merciful state. For some people in some terrible situations, the same dynamics apply. Freezing is a powerful, involuntary response of intense immobility. For some people it may be triggered when no other threat response seems like it will work. For others, freezing may be the result of both the fight and flight responses being triggered at the same time.

Where the freeze response immobilises, the fold response is a complete collapse of independent will. This threat response is about extreme submission and compliance. In the short term it can be life saving. It can also (like all of these threat responses) be catastrophic if used in the wrong situation. In the long term it may unfold as stockholm syndrome.

So, in response to a threat, Rose froze. At some point, she then ran. Fortunately, she was able to then stop and think about where would be safest to go. She decided to find the conference. When I found her in a quiet room at the conference, she told me what had happened. She was reluctant to tell me and already feeling a deep sense of shame about the assault. She was also highly stressed and dissociative and in a very traumatised state.

The conference was about an hour by public transport away from where we were staying in Melbourne. We also had bought tickets that night for a ‘Mad Hatter’s Party’ which was being held at a hotel across the city. My first impulse was to cancel the party and get us both home. When I suggested this, Rose was extremely distressed. To buy ourselves time to settle and talk about the evening’s plans, we instead walked to a nearby restaurant. This was a plan she liked. I knew that if I could help Rose to eat and drink, this would reduce her dissociation and help her to communicate what she needed.

We were fortunate in that a nearby restaurant had a fire lit. Rose was extremely cold, which is a common trauma reaction – basically she was in shock. The nearest table to the fire already had people sitting at it, the lovely Lewis Mehl-Madrona and his gracious wife, resting after a big day at the conference. In an unusual step for me, I asked if we could join them so I could sit Rose as close as possible to the fire. We found a risotto on the menu she felt she could stomach in her upset state (digestion shuts down when you are very anxious), and ordered drinks with bitters in them so the strong flavour would help to ground us. I sat next to Rose and kept an eye behind her to make sure that no one came up to her without her seeing them approach. Literally having someone’s back like this is very important at this point. New tiny shocks after a big trauma can embed the sense of terror more deeply, because the reaction to the little shocks is overblown and involuntary. Where people start off distressed and feeling helpless due to the trauma, they move on to feeling distressed and helpless to prevent the ongoing trauma reaction they are having. We both knew this, and as much as possible made it normal that Rose was agitated and hypervigilent. Rose did not wish for the others sharing the table to know what was going on so we did not disclose it.

Food, warmth, company, and drink all helped to ease some of Rose’s dissociation and distress. We started to talk about our plans for that evening. Rose was adamant about not missing the Mad Hatter’s Party, and also very concerned about not being able to cope with it. It was tempting for me to overrule her and refuse to attend. I was very mindful of her need to be heard and to restore some control over events so I tried to work with her instead. She was anxious about the assault making me miss out on something important I had been looking forward to. The thought of this was increasing her shame, guilt, and self loathing where she was blaming herself for the assault, blaming herself for freezing, blaming herself for telling me about it (and ‘ruining my time at the conference’) and blaming herself for having a trauma reaction to it afterwards. I could see that doing the ‘right’ thing and cancelling was actually going to make her distress much worse. So instead I attempted to reduce the intensity of the dilemma. I agreed to go to the party, on a relaxed, let’s-see-how-it-goes approach, with no shame or blame if either of us decided it was a stressful kind of event and wanted to go home early. I made the call that we would catch a private taxi instead of public transport to get home. Rose agreed to leave the party if it was intolerably stressful, and accepted the offer of a taxi with only a token protest about expense. I had no desire to deal with buses myself at that point either.

So, we trekked across Melbourne and found our way to the party. It was loud, cramped, and possibly the least trauma-friendly environment we could have gone to! But Rose was determined, so we found a good seat – from the point of view of not too far from the exit, back to the wall, able to see everyone. Rose ate nibbles as they came around. I bought a jug of lemonade. We shared half an alcoholic drink to take the edge off. (one drink can help, more is generally not a good idea) I couldn’t eat much as my adrenaline was too high.

I put all my own feelings about the assault in a mental box and ignored them. This is a pretty important skill when you’re trying to support someone else. I had a genuinely good time, made some friends, gave out some business cards, danced, had a laugh. I checked back in with Rose frequently. She was happy we had made it but stressed about the crowding and the really loud music. Eventually we decided to call it a night. We held hands tightly as we walked into the night and found a taxi. I didn’t let her hand go until we were both in the car, and then I held it all through the drive ‘home’.

Home that night we gently piled into bed and unpacked our feelings a bit more. I held her hand as Rose bravely opened up about a number of fears and areas of shame that were turning up for her about the assault. We discussed and countered them together. Was it her fault? No. Had she asked for it? No. Could she have seen it coming? Well – maybe, that’s a hard call. If on reflection she thinks she could have been more alert, that’s okay. It still doesn’t mean she didn’t anything wrong and certainly doesn’t make it her fault. Do I still find her attractive? Hell yes! Will I be upset or angry if she doesn’t want to be touched? Not at all. What about if she doesn’t want to be touched again ever? It will be okay. We’ll still be friends, even if we are never romantic partners again. Touch will only happen if and when and how she wants it.

We keep talking and crying. I share how sad I am for her, how angry I feel about it – but not with a lot of emotional intensity. The crucial thing is to be present but allow how Rose is feeling to be paramount. She should know I feel things too, but not be comforting me. My voice and words are sad and gentle but also express quiet confidence that she knows she needs to manage this and will get through it okay. She shares a little about some of the other memories that have been stirred up for her. I listen. She talks about the freeze response, and talks about other responses she’s had to threat. I emphasize that a freeze reaction is involuntary and does not mean she ‘asked for it’ or ‘wanted it’. She finds this helpful and the sense of shame diminishes. We turn the memories over together, the upsides and downsides of different reactions in different situations. It’s always tempting to bury everything in platitudes and reassurance, but this questioning is necessary. Rose, like most of us, needs someone to gently engage with her about the complex moral questions these kind of situations raise.

After a while she asks me to touch her back. I run my hands over her t-shirt. She asks me to go under her shirt and touch her skin. I stroke her back gently, checking that the pressure, pace, and type of touch are what she wants. She shakes and cries a little. I want to hold her tightly but restrain myself. I cry a little too. We lay close and hold hands. After a while she cuddles up under my arm and lays her head on my chest. I can feel my heart beating, like a big sad drum. I hold her close, we tell each other how much we love each other. We go to sleep.

If you’re reading this hoping for suggestions on how to manage with your own partner, I’d suggest reading Intimacy After Abuse, and my series about emotionally safer sex which starts with Safe Sex 1: Checking in.

Fear of the dark

Nov 12, 2013Nov 25, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

So another sinus infection stakes it’s claim on my face. The locum reckons it’s going bacterial but my enthusiasm to take antibiotics again is negligible. I’m run down and tired and already have thrush so thanks but no thanks! I’ve cancelled work for the next few days as I’m developing signs of a chest infection too. Have to be well enough to drive to Melbourne for the hearing voices congress next week!

Rose has also been sick with gastro, mercifully brief but horribly unpleasant, so we’ve been unhappy comrades in arms for a few days. She’s also been under a lot of badly timed job stress. Yesterday I spent half of it winning medals for being the most useful and supportive girlfriend, and the second half winning medals for being the most overwrought and unhelpful girlfriend. Dammit. Oddly enough when I crashed she rallied in that funky little see-saw turn taking thing couples can do. Thankfully!

My life only tends to work out in small windows before the next really bad thing happens. This makes me pretty anxious and reactive to a whole bunch of triggers suggesting a new crash is about to happen. I once went to see a shrink for help to make new friends. I knew I had DID but wasn’t out about it to anyone, rather was deeply deeply afraid of anyone finding out. I talked with this shrink about how lonely and emotionally unstable I was. We talked about a common painful dynamic for me at the time – having a moment of really good connection with someone, perhaps a new acquaintance, and going home feeling like things are looking up! Excited about my future, really happy with how the conversation went, reassured that I would make new friends. And then the dawning realisation over the next days of weeks that this wasn’t the case. The wonderful day was not the start of a new life, not a sign of good things to come. It was an exception. That friend would be busy for the rest of the year. The acquaintance wouldn’t come back to uni. The compliment from the boss didn’t mean I was going to be rostered on for more shifts.

The shrink advised me to live entirely in the moment. To take everything at face value only and stop hoping that life would get better. It’s the hope that makes you unstable she advised me. Stop thinking about the future. She was right, of course. Her solution was a bit drastic. At the time, without hope that life would get better, I would have killed myself. The instability was painful but worth it for me.

Narrative therapy is a fascinating field I’d love to know more about. A kernel of an idea about it is this : the stories we tell about our lives and who we are are profoundly powerful. In my life two stores compete for my attention. One is a story of hope and acceptance. That how others have hurt me is not my fault. That it is not a failure to be poor, or sick, or hurting. That life can and does get better after awful things have happened, that scars and hearts heal and love and joy live alongside anguish.

The other sorry is darker. That I am broken. Fatally flawed. Doomed. That nothing I can do, not my best efforts, all my strength, all my love, can stop the dark. That nothing works out for me. Life requires risks and my risks send me tumbling into ravines.

This story has weight for me, a lot of evidence behind it. It becomes something I watch for, signs my world is ending again. A dark foreboding. A quiet despair in my heart. So I make plans, wonderful plans for my life. And I have nightmares, where Rose dies, where our child is terminally ill, or abused, where we both end up homeless with little kids in the back seat of the car. The dark eats my dreams. A little voice inside says if you’re thinking of having kids soon, you’ve got a shrinking window in which to kill yourself before you leave them with the burden of a dead mother.

This is horrible and people are often horrified when I talk about it. They try and reassure me that life is better now. But once bad things have happened to you, you know in your bones, they can again. It haunts me. In a weird way it’s a relief when they do happen and I can stop waiting for them, stop being encouraged to believe in an ideology about good things happening to deserving people that I know is mostly an illusion.

That relief reminds of the cycle of domestic violence. You get the slow building tension, then the rage/abuse/violence, then the honeymoon period where everything is wonderful. Then the tension builds again. People get so stressed and exhausted by the tension building stage, the paranoia it inspires, the knowledge that violence is inevitable, that they sometimes deliberately act to trigger it.

So, I’m in a DV cycle with the universe? (Is that what the crisis driven aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder is about?)

Last night, sobbing hysterically as Rose sang to me and rubbed my back, I understood how hard I work to keep believing in hope. Not a pollyana hope, a darker kind of hope. That my life, even with pain, will have meaning. That choices I make count. That I have some power to bring light into my life. That I can build a philosophy that understands loss, death, and failure, so that they wound but do not destroy me. That I can live in today, and dream, and if the sky falls tomorrow I can howl then. Keep building the ideas of failure and tragedy into my world, into my hope, into my love. Keep chasing freedom when the trap closes about me. Get help to hold back the dark. Someone to hold me when the nightmares come.

Tonks has also had a rough day. We took him to the vet this morning to be desexed only to discover that he is a she. She’s now sleeping on a shelf in my studio with her fancy new cone. Poor love.

First abusive, anonymous email

Oct 29, 2013Oct 29, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

Well, it had to happen sometime. I’ve been writing this blog for over two years, and out about having DID and being bisexual, both of which potentially expose me to abuse, violence, or ridicule in various circles. I received this email recently, from someone calling themselves, of all things, Pig Wheeky:

“I know u. I know your secret. Fat stupid ugly girl-no friends-no one loves u-u cling to your fictitious difference-to prove u r not insignificant-dissociative, gay- what next-how can u look in the mirror-how can u pretend in the face of those who have suffered real trauma-kill yourself-your deceit-your lies r unforgivable -u ir sickening-always know that we see through u. U r harming people that have genuinely survived horror-u r unbelievable-i know u dont care-u r borderline and psychopathic-u cant even look after an animal without rspca on your back-i know u -loser-yes i know-and u know what u r-u would b surprised how many of us c through u-u r your own hell-and u will reap. :)”

What fun. There’s nothing quite like linking borderline personality disorder and psychopathy to really give yourself credibility, and the movement between the personal “I” and attempt to sound like an important majority by using “we”. It’s all a bit pathetic.

I’ve received hate mail before, although admittedly from people I’ve known. The internet opens up so many opportunities for people to behave appallingly and hide behind anonymity. This kind of bullying is the crap that people like me face. Being open about these kinds of things leave you vulnerable to people who fear and hate and who give themselves permission to be abusive to those they deem deserving and still feel like ‘good people’ themselves. Bullying in the form of instructions or requests that someone hurt or kill themselves is common and disgusting. It’s taken awhile for policies in schools and the like to catch up with how vulnerable people can be coerced into harming themselves, to the sadistic delight of abusers who don’t even have to get their hands dirty to inflict harm.

Anyone who uses tactics like this has no claim on the moral high ground, and certainly none whatsoever about how to best care for and support people who have experienced trauma. I don’t believe anyone is insignificant. All of us are unique, have our own stories and paths to walk, our own souls to care for. All of us have to wrestle with the task of how to navigate a complex, at times very painful life, and be as human as we can, to grow into the best we can be in values and character. Some of us grow kinder and gentler through the awful things we experience. Some of us grow colder and vicious. Those who become vile are to be treated with great caution, and regarded with deep sadness. Once they too were innocent. Corruption is always a terrible loss of who they could have and should have been, what they could have brought to the world. We who are abused by them are still, oddly, the lucky ones.

Having said that, we need love and care to survive and endure the cruelty and brutality of these kinds of assaults on ourselves. Every day people suffer due to bullying like this. People are made to feel alone, ugly, less then everyone else. The wounds can be deep, can even be fatal. Love heals. Anger cleanses. Hope brings life. In community and with connection we are restored.

Thankyou to all of the people who love and support me, to the community I’ve been so blessed to find. Remember all the people like me who don’t have this. Look for them, shield them from this kind of destructive hatred. Shelter each other. Help each other to be the best we can be.

Good food and discussions about the future

Oct 24, 2013Jan 7, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today I slept, panicked, worked on finishing all the preparation I need to have done to offer henna art at a gig for the first time on Friday, panicked some more, and had Rose and my sister over for dinner. I’m now back to panicking and henna prep again. It’s been a long day. Dinner was lovely. We made prawn rolls.

Yum! Rose and I are still eating lots of salads and I’m loving that. Some days lately when my anxiety is so high it’s the only meal I have. It was so nice to sit at the table and share and talk about the future. The three of us are making exciting plans for next year together with housing and plans for babies. I’m so thrilled and so anxious too, there’s a raw feeling when I talk about dreams and ideas about family and community and the future. I dropped my sister home and on the drive back, alone in the night, found myself shaking and weeping. I don’t want to be homeless again. I don’t ever want to be on the run from a violent relationship again. I don’t want to feel trapped again, to be sharing a bed with someone who frightens me or makes me feel deeply alone. I’m pro equal marriage rights but terrified of the prospect of being a wife again. Reading Centrelink documents that explained that if Rose and I share a place – even as flatmates with separate bedrooms, we will be considered by the government to be in a ‘marriage like relationship’ made me break down in uncontrollable sobbing.

I’m also in love, with a beautiful, devoted, loving woman who I hate being apart from so often, hate having to drive back to my own unit at the end of the night, want to be able to support when she’s ill, help cook for, share what I have with. I hate that the government will not allow us to live together but maintain separate finances. It feels deeply creepy to me, state-sponsored prostitution, that I can live with anyone as long as I don’t sleep with them, and sleep with anyone as long I don’t live with them. Weirdly the financial penalties are reversed when children are in the picture, as single parents are penalised where partnered parents are not. I don’t like the enforced dependence, the forcing of what we have into something it is not, into ‘marriage like’ when what we have is built on friendship, is platonic and romantic, is built on freedom and a deep care for our mutual vulnerability and limits.

Hope and fear, dreams, desires, longing and loss. Good food with people I love. Another shoe eaten by the dog, another day at work that leaves me frozen with anxiety. Life is challenging.

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.

Letting it go

Oct 3, 2013Jan 7, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

I’m sad tonight. There’s been pain in some of my friendships lately. Relationships with other people who’ve come through trauma, or other multiples, can be deeply rewarding, but they can also be more troubled and under greater strain. Sometimes the risks I take don’t work out the way I’d hoped. The last two friends I grew close enough to to tell them I loved them are no longer speaking to me. My heart mourns. So many hopes about the future come tumbling down, the sadness is unbearable at times, and the gnawing fear. It’s hard to make sense of. Life suddenly takes a different path. Parts of me are distraught, other parts have more perspective. Tonight, it’s lonely in my unit. I can feel dreams flying away from me, like balloons with cut strings. It hurts and I let it hurt.

In the sadness I find two things; that all things change. That nothing at all takes away from the good memories, from the hope and care and growth and fun we had, the safe spaces we made for each other. I find it strange that our culture only deems those relationships that last until death parts them to be significant. What we had counted, and what we did mattered, maybe not to anyone else in the world, but for each other, it mattered. We will never be as if we had not met. We take it all with us.

And the other thing? That if you love something, you set it free.

Today I went to a second hand shop and I bought two beautiful baby wraps. They are the first baby items I have ever bought for myself. A long time ago, before I was diagnosed with DID, when I was very sick, a long term relationship ended and I found myself often stuck in the baby aisle of a shopping centre, with a hole punched in my chest so large I couldn’t breathe around it. The grief of the children I did not have stayed with me.

Now Rose and I are talking about children of our own. When things in my life I’d hoped would last much longer and be much stronger fade away like they have this year, having a child seems like madness. I don’t consider it because I believe my life and relationships are stable and unchanging. I am confronting my incapacity to work full time and support a family. I have no idea where I will be in 5 years time or what my life will look like. Life changes, takes wing beneath you, turns on a dime. Both opportunities and tragedy await, and only some can be predicted. I can consider this because I know I can survive my world breaking. Because I understand that life changes. And because I believe that some things do not change, and that I can continue to make choices guided by love and compassion. It’s all we can do.

Empathy and bullying

Sep 28, 2013May 25, 2015 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Amanda Palmer wrote a piece about empathy and cyber bullying on her tumblr recently that I found thought provoking.

I think people misunderstand, sometimes, the difference between “empathy” and “sympathy”, and this is getting us in trouble. Sympathy is closer to pity. Empathy, which is essential for being human, means that you can imagine yourself in some else’s situation, good or bad. And feeling *real* empathy, even empathy with “the enemy”, with the bottom of the barrel of humanity, with the suicide bombers, with the child molesters, with the hitlers and the osamas, is necessary. If you, as a human being, can’t stop and try to imagine what sort of pain and agony and darkness must have descended upon these people to twist them up so badly, you have no roadmap to untwist the circumstances under which they were created.

via i was just answering a bunch of questions for a… – AMANDAPALMER.TUMBLR.COM.

I wrote this as a comment on the piece:

As if empathy comes only from our best selves, as if it’s only our kindness, or generosity that allows us to reach out and feel what another person feels. Our darkness also unites us in strange and painful ways, other’s pain or violence sings to our own, make claims of kinship where we wish there were none. We like to make the evil ‘other’ – those abusers, those nazis, those demonic monsters who have no connection to me, no humanity left in them. It’s painful to recognise that a lack of humanity is part of what it is to be human, that our humanness is vulnerable, it can be torn off, or cast off, and we can still walk and speak and eat and do violence. Empathy reminds us that the monsters do not merely prey upon us, they are us, defiled. It reminds us to treasure what makes us different from them.

It’s a topic I find relevant in many areas of my life, as an artist, and as a service provider in mental health. As soon as there is an ‘other’, you risk your bond to your own group by empathising with them. It’s one of the things that makes peer work so difficult and draining for me, the service users and the service providers can be strident and aggressive in their demands that I orient myself as one of them exclusively. I’ve lost count of the number of times staff in mental health have criticized me for ‘wearing my peer worker hat’ or my stance on how harmful our use of professional boundaries is. I’ve also struggled with how demoralising and painful it is when other service users criticise harshly, with no sense that you are also a person who is at times vulnerable, and that all relationships have some level of mutuality to them. Other peer workers can also be a group of their own, demanding adherence to their ideas – after giving a personal and exhausting talk at a conference once, I had to walk out of the next talk where a peer worker was berating a room of us for being insufficiently familiar with the world of academic research, and for getting jobs through people we knew. All groups place demands upon who is permitted to be a part of them. All groups have their ‘other’.

At a micro level, this dynamic of the ‘other’ and the risks of empathy play out in groups or friendship networks in my life in a way that wearies me. I’ve always empathised with the other, and this is the quality that people love in me when they find themselves being the other, and fear and resent in me when they find themselves hurt, stressed, or angry with someone else in the other role.

I’ve often been the ‘other’. I’ve been a lonely, bullied little kid who craved friendship and companionship with a deep longing that left me suicidal by the age of 10. I work hard now as an adult to be aware of the legacy of years of unmet needs, which tend to express themselves through numbness, bitterness, insecurity, and instability. I also work hard to resist the temptation to be comfortable in my groups, my social networks, and my work in a way that perpetuates abuse. As a service provider in mental health, I find this an extraordinary challenge. On days when I am too exhausted to do the hard work of diplomacy, to reassure angry and hurt people (which is not just the clients!) that I see their point of view, I’m at risk of rejection and hostility. It’s not a secure place to be.

This is one of the dynamics they don’t talk about in bullying. I moved to a new school in year 4. Due to a bunch of class dynamics that had nothing to do with me, I was instantly at the bottom of the social ranking and very vulnerable. Several students targeted me for bullying. This began a spiral of alienation and abuse that persisted for my school life. I was in a bad place where students who liked me were afraid to connect with me in case they were bullied too, and other students who liked me were afraid to tell their friends to stop bullying me in case they then became a target.

I didn’t stay at the bottom of the social network all the time. Sometimes something would shift my place in the culture. One year the class took up gymnastics and swimming in sports, where I excelled. I gained some respect in a subject where my appalling lack of ball skills and issues with feet and joints had left me the typical student chosen last for every team. Here’s the deal though, just because I was no longer on the bottom rung of the ladder didn’t mean the ladder had been dismantled. Someone else took my place, someone who was terrible at swimming perhaps, or embarrassed by wearing leotards in gym. There was always someone being made to feel excluded, being available for humiliation and power games, someone that everyone else could work out their own pain or frustration upon. Kids with disabilities that were insufficiently engaging to draw the protection of the teachers. Kids with mental health problems, or with abuse at home. Kids who were identified as gay (which is not the same thing as being gay).

One year in about grade 9, I’d cobbled together a small group of guys as friends. We would hang out at lunch, sometimes after school, even go to each other’s birthday parties. Another kid used to hang out with us sometimes. We used to play a lot of foursquare or brandy, fast ball games I was never particularly good at. On this day, this other kid was hanging with us, and he was terrible at ball sports and slow at running due to medical things. My mates were teasing him a bit, in a pretty good natured way, knocking the ball away from him so that he couldn’t pick it up. It wasn’t until he started to cry with frustration that my stomach flipped and the scenario that had seemed so minor and innocent a moment before suddenly became real. I was hanging out with a group and we were bullying the one kid lower on the food chain than we were. I ran over to him to comfort him and told off my mates.

As it happened, a teacher witnessed this and I was given a slip of paper later that week commending me for being brave enough to risk my friends being annoyed with me. Having this teacher recognise the challenges of that situation and frame my response in this way anchored an understanding of the risks and issues of bullying for me that has never left me. I learned a lot that day, especially how unbelievably minor bullying seems to be when you are not the target. I also learned that without some kind of major social influence in the class or school – if you stand up for someone being abused you are always risking abuse yourself. Every time I got off that bottom rung, I’d find myself being forced into a bystander position to watch some other kid suffer. Groups of students roaming the school to hunt down the ‘gay kid’ and intimidate him. Older students roughing up younger students in the toilets. Girls humiliating and ostracizing other girls who were from poor families, or had accidents with menstruation, or who made the mistake of letting the wrong boy go too far with them.

These cultures cost everyone in them, they are built on fear, distrust, a profound need to fit in and find acceptance that seems laughable to adults, and a complex guessing game of social worth where a misstep can cost you all your allies. Everytime we tackle school bullying by advising the victims to behave in ways that make them less a target, we are also telling them to accept their role as bystanders to those kids who become the target next.

I had a weird relationship with many of the kids who bullied me. Those who had some kind of social power and were tormenting me out of boredom, sadism, or fear of difference I rarely got close to. But kids who tortured because they were themselves being tortured often had a strange connection with me. There was an empathetic bond. I heard their stories. I kept their histories of fear and degradation safe. These were kids who’s dad’s knocked their mum’s around, or whose older brothers were creatively abusive, or whose mum’s made them keep her company in her bed at nights long into their teens. With some of them, a space would be created for these conversations, like long bus school trips. They’d sit with me and talk, share funny stories or tell me secrets about painful things. They would meet needs for safety and honesty and compassion that they couldn’t in their own friendships. I would not get those needs met. At the end of the trip we’d all get off the bus with the unspoken understanding that the truce was over and I was fair game again. It wasn’t personal, someone had to be on the bottom rung. Half the kids who tormented me only did it to make sure it wasn’t going to be them. The same dynamic happened for me in theatre, where for the duration of the play I was a valued part of a team. Once it was over I would be distraught, because my membership died with the play, and the brutal reality of my lonely life would once again return.

The problem here isn’t the bully or the behaviour of the victim, it is a group dynamic that treats some kids as more important than others, more worthy of protection, more powerful and privileged, and those at the bottom of that as fair game because they brought it on themselves. In some classrooms, those with power – kids with a lot of influence, or insightful teachers, influence this dynamic and make it safer to be unpopular and disliked or in conflict with the popular people. In other classes – like mine, there’s a dark undercurrent of abuse, violence, mental illness, pain, alienation, and rage, and these things are expressed through a brutal social dynamic that leaves every student afraid of winding up as the target.

My empathy with my bullies made life hard for me. It’s difficult to tear a kid to shreds when you know s/he’s only making your life miserable because s/he’s in terrible pain. It is also made life difficult for me because I hated that I purchased my freedom from being bullied at the cost of having to be a bystander to the abuse of another kid. I could have gone through school with a lot less bullying, and a lot more inclusion, but the cost to my own values and beliefs was always higher than I was willing to pay. Everytime I got off the bottom rung I found myself allying with the next kid on it. I never developed enough social power to change the dynamic itself.

I remember once at about 15, confronting a boy who had bullied me terribly as a kid. I was struggling tremendously at the time, and in a difficult twist of events my drama group were doing a play that included a nazi youth betraying and abusing someone. This boy had been cast in the role of the abuser. Week after week of rehearsals, I sat and watched my bully torment another person. It was a powerful trigger and turned what had been my haven into a nightmare of hyper-vigilance and flashbacks I was trying desperately to conceal. One day I went to drink from a water fountain and he came up behind me and leaned in to drink from the one next to me. I hadn’t realised he was near and flinched back. He looked at me with derision and asked why I always did that around him. The world paused for a moment.

I decided to call him out. I unfocused my gaze so that I could look him in the face without seeing him, and told him that when we were younger he used to bully me a lot. I was expecting contempt or denial. What I got confused me.

He looked suddenly deeply sad and alone. It was like I could see a child in him drop his head, turn away, and walk off down a long corridor. He said to me “You have no idea how many kids have told me that. I don’t remember any of it.” And then he walked away. I don’t recall ever speaking with him again. This is a kid who I still sometimes have nightmares about.

Those are not too uncomfortable stories to tell, they make me sound like a victim or a hero. I played that role at times in other’s lives, but I also hurt people. I made choices I now regret, I was not honest with people, I used the little power that I did have in ways that excluded and hurt others. Most of us have power somewhere in our lives. We work out our rage or our demons from the places we don’t have it in the areas we do have it. I’m still trying to make sense of this.

When I was 14 I allied with a girl I’ll call Alison who was being bullied by her group of friends. She paid a high price for inclusion in their group, she was often run down, criticised, and her job was basically to fetch and carry. I was angry about this and she and I disconnected from them to hang out with each other. I then went through hell with a classmate who fell in ‘love’ with me, and tangled me into his suicidal distress. My capacity to empathise with him touched profound unmet needs to be heard and feel connected. He became obsessive and dangerous. At the end of a six month ordeal I was left with PTSD and total confusion about what just happened and why.

Alison had her own demons, and instead of finding comfort in our friendship she became a burden. She didn’t understand the PTSD, and neither did I. She couldn’t understand my new terror of touch, my sense of disconnection, the simmering rage that lay waiting beneath an apathy so heavy I didn’t care if I died. Her efforts to connect exhausted and triggered me. One day she covered my whole desk in tiny sickeningly cute stickers of teddy bears while I was away. I often had belongings defaced or stolen by my bullies. I was furious, and choked it down to ask her not to touch my stuff. She didn’t understand. I couldn’t explain. I had run out of capacity to cope with things that didn’t used to matter so much, like being traded in at lunch time if someone more interesting was happy to include her. Our friendship had never been strong enough or close enough to have those conversations, and when I had been in a better place I could afford more generosity for the times she hurt me. I didn’t tell her about any of this, I just retreated. I pushed her completely out of my life over a 6 month period and justified it on the basis that she had always been hard work and I no longer had the energy. She was devastated. Her every effort to reconnect was rebuffed. I took her away from her original friends, made her feel safe and cared about, then dumped her alone. She was vulnerable and bullied and left with no idea of what just happened. I was not a hero in her story. I work very hard in my friendships now, to find ways to be both honest and warm. I fail. I try again.

We can turn empathy off when it no longer suits us in ways that are frightening. It is hard to acknowledge the times we have done that, because it put us in a place where have to see our own role as something we have no respect for. It’s hard to face our own limitations and flaws, and even harder to face them and still find sense of love and self-acceptance. Empathy can also be dangerous. It’s kept me in relationships where I was being hurt, because I struggled to wrap my brain around a crucial idea: that being able to understand someone’s behaviour is not a reason to put up with it. (See Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity) Over-empathising with someone in a position of power who lacks empathy for you is extremely dangerous. Empathy has cost me my peace and my chance to slip unnoticed through high school while other kids suffered, but it’s also protected my sense of identity and values. It’s a way I connect with other people, but it also alienates me from them when I empathise with someone I’m not supposed to.

Power scares me senseless. One of the things I have learned about it is that very often, we don’t notice when we have it. We don’t FEEL powerful. We are acutely and painfully aware of every area of life where it is absent and yet often oblivious to the places we do have it. We repeat learned dynamics, and set up new relationships on the same principles as the old, with merely a shuffle in what role we now play. We demand responsibility and empathy from those who have power over us, but are frequently unaware and uncaring of the way we use our own power. We want to be understood and loved, but often there are people we wish to draw a line around and say I do not want to have to understand or love them.

Peer workers are constantly being co-opted into the role of staff, pressured to choose a primary allegiance to the organisation that employs them. With the need for work, we are in an impossibly vulnerable position, carrying the weight of the need to be or provide a voice for all the other dis-empowered people, and trying to unite two groups of people who are often hopelessly incapable of having empathy for each other. When groups are full of fear or pain, they do not allow their members to be dual citizens, and they demand a loyalty to their own members that prohibits the capacity for empathy for the other – whether the ‘other’ is a terrorist, a bully, or a victim. We see and rightly decry this process when the alienated other is someone vulnerable, but we justify it when the other is someone we need to believe we share nothing in common with.

This empathy has written me out of my plans to get a job in mental health. There are amazing people working in it, people who have found a capacity within themselves to recognise the limits of their power, and to let go of what they cannot change. I have not. I am afraid of power and what it does to someone who wields it without reflection. I am afraid of the temptation of money and group belonging and security. I am afraid of the slow erosion of values. I do not trust myself to walk that path with wisdom, only with profound regret. I cannot stop empathising, at any point, with the person in the room with the least voice and power, and it kills me. Especially when they are angry with me, disappointed in me, or critiquing my services. I find myself split between my own perspective and theirs in a way that tears my head apart. I often find myself the only person working to see more than one perspective and find a way to unite them. I still have almost no capacity to see the limits of my own reach and accept them. Being required to be a bystander to things I find unjust makes me want to burn down buildings and run screaming into the night. I don’t cope well with systems, even those I build myself.

I don’t have answers for this. My path forwards is to always do my best to live with love. I believe that empathy is crucial, not only for those who are hurt, but those who are hurting others. Not to condone or minimize, but to face the world as it is, and the potential for darkness in others and ourselves. We can empathise with people and still utterly denounce their actions and hold them accountable. Sometimes following our instincts protects us from our own darkness, sometimes we find ourselves doing harm and don’t know how we got there. Empathy is part of understanding that, making some sense of what happened in those who now lack it, and how to strengthen it in ourselves and our communities. When we empathise with an ‘other’ we stretch ourselves over no man’s land to do so. In a war, this means our guts are ripped up by barbed wire, and we risk both groups tossing us into the no mans land. When it’s to a ‘monster’, we must face the disturbing reality of our own vulnerability to losing what makes us human, and we risk the rest of the world thinking of and treating us as one of the monsters.

“I got death threats. My twitter feed exploded with more than 5,000 tweets from strangers telling me I was a un-american monster for “sympathizing with a terrorist”. People wrote comments on my blog about how I should have my own legs blown off.”

via i was just answering a bunch of questions for a… – AMANDAPALMER.TUMBLR.COM.

In our friendships, empathy inspires a level of courage to be both loving and warm in ways that power confuses and trauma overwhelms. It is very easy to let myself off the hook for hurting Alison, and yet to be deeply wounded and angry at friends who have done this to me. I keep coming back to the same ideas – that it is difficult to remain fully human. That the act of living alters and erodes identity. That love can fill our lives to the brim, and also cost us everything. That love is essential but insufficient. That the alienated are also alienating.

We think we are kind, when we are only happy

CS Lewis

There are only two motives,
two procedures, two frameworks,
two results.
Love and fear.
Love and fear.

Michael Leunig

Boat over black waters

Sep 17, 2013Jan 7, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I sail my little boat over black waters at the moment. Old wounds in me suppurate, old rage is fresh again. I find myself grappling with new questions – how to be wounded in community? Where do I take this pain? If I hide it all I build a wall between my heart and the people I love. I live alone with it, in a cold place where love does not reach me. If I share it all, I spread it, like a disease. There’s so much loss in the lives of those I love, so many bad stories waiting in the shadows. I want to bring love, not fall like dominoes. I find myself tangled in dilemmas of ethics and honesty and respect. I know how to grieve, and I know how to suffer alone. I don’t know how to place my friendships. There’s a terror and a brutal loneliness in psychosis for me that hasn’t entirely gone. There’s gaps between my friends who grieve Amanda and those who didn’t know her I’m struggling to connect. I find myself struggling to move between sarah-in-community and sarah-alone, between the peer worker and the friend, one who offers and one who likewise needs.

Last night Rose visited. We were both fragile, we arranged; no heavy conversations, no reaching into that pain. Just companionship. Like boats rocking over black water, we knew but did not need to speak of it. I found poems to read her to sleep. She stroked my back, touch grounding me, writing me back into being. We were careful with each other’s brokenness, held our limitations gently in our hands.

There was no screaming spiral of pain that sings to pain, destruction unknitting all that we are, souls seared by scars. There was tenderness, acceptance, closeness. We didn’t ask of each other more than we could give. Somehow, instead of loneliness, there was love. There was love.

See more like this:

Waves of sadness

Sep 16, 2013Sep 16, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Tired now. Amanda’s funeral is Thursday. Last night I didn’t sleep at all. Got a few hours today after going to bed at 9am. Fragile and hurting, overwhelmed by waves of sadness. Today I can’t be the diplomat, can’t bridge the gap between myself and others, think through their perspective and mine and find a way to connect them. I do this a lot. Some days I’m just too exhausted.

Lay in bed last night with someone inside me begging to be allowed to self harm. Intense and distraught. Self care become alien, painful even, unsettling, impossible. It takes all day to talk myself into breakfast, having a shower.

Woke up tangled in grief and anger and frustration and called lifeline instead of venting on friends or in any public spaces. Struggling to navigate pain and vulnerability in the context of a community. Are we not all on some level alone with our pain? It’s not easy to face our limitations. I’m under no illusions that if Amanda had only reached out to me, she’d have been okay. What then do I believe?

Some days it feels to me that how I manage my pain alone at 3am is then brought before my world at 10am for judgement. We can’t always be there for each other. (and yet we say it, we need to believe it, need to extend hands of friendship over the chasm and hope they will never lean on it too much for us to bear) Trying to understand the chill in my heart, the way my bones grow cold. Is it me, or them, or all of us? I hate myself. I can’t let love in, but indifference and disdain I eat off the floor. I’m lost. Trying not to need, not to lean, not to bleed out, not to disconnect, lash out, break everything apart, walk away from it all.

I’ll find a way through, but tonight I’m lost.

Home Base for Homeless People

Sep 9, 2013Aug 31, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

So you have a friend who’s homeless, or one at risk. You can’t take them in at your place (for whatever reason). What can you do? There’s a whole lot of ways to help. One pretty easy thing you can do is to provide a home base. A lot of folks spend time travelling and backpacking and having a ball living a very transient lifestyle, and part of the thing that makes this fun instead of traumatising is that somewhere they have a home base where their stuff is kept safe. For most of us as younger people, this is a parent. There’s a spare room, a garage, or an attic stuffed with boxes of paraphernalia that’s really meaningful to us but which we don’t have to carry around. Most of us don’t even bring this stuff with us when we move out as students or young workers. Small units or share houses are not the best place for excess belongings, so they wait until we’re older and way more settled. Many of us also have things of great sentimental value that we don’t own but will probably inherit one day and will remember family members or great childhood events by. These all stay safe in the care of whoever currently owns them. Lastly, many travelers have their VIP documents stashed safely with someone who can look after them, scan and email them to us if we suddenly need them.

Image courtesy of Roger rgbstock.com/gallery/rkirbycom

This home base is one of the things it’s easy to take for granted if you’ve always had it. Most people who are homeless do not. Anything they can’t carry is lost to them. Any items of sentimental value are left behind, there’s no extended family to just take over looking after the dog, there’s no security even for the things they are able to carry around. This loss is drastic, it hurts like hell. It’s part of the reason people are so reluctant to leave violent partners, it’s something abusive parents can hold over their children, it’s another Gap that opens up between happy adventurers and distressed homeless people.

Depending on your situation, you might be able to offer to look after their cat, to put some important paperwork in your filing cabinet, to keep their digital photo collection stashed on your computer, to keep some of their best clothes in a rack in your wardrobe, to have a box of food they can use as a pantry, to hold onto some precious jewelry. You can help them find cheap public lockers to stash shoes and a phone charger, or long term storage if they’re salvaged larger items. Things they can’t keep you can take photos of; kids sports trophies, a record collection, the cross stitch Nan made for them. Having a record can help when you have to let go of so much at once. There’s such a dislocation that looking through photos later can be something that helps to process it all, to link the old life and the new life together. There’s free cloud storage for digital photos through services like dropbox or google plus.

Homebase can also be about providing a little normality to an experience that is surreal and disconnected. Having someone round for a meal once a week, hanging out and watching tv together afterwards can be a routine that anchors them to a world where things are still safe and predictable. It can help to ground someone who is spiraling. Don’t assume that this happens in services. Most of the services are not good at providing any kind of emotional support or stability. Being up to hang out with you at the dog park for an hour can be the most normal thing that has happened to that person all week. Getting people out of services, even if it’s just for short breaks, can be critical to keeping them sane. Being surrounded by other traumatised people and the extremely weird combination of ‘normal privacy doesn’t exist, normal relationships don’t exist, professional boundaries limit connection, and everyone else is an expert on your life’ that characterises extended contact with staff in services is very hard on people. Helping them get breaks from this and to reconnect with a world where they are regular people for awhile can make a big difference.

Listening and providing emotional support can also help a lot, although I do suggest that you don’t get in the way with this. This kind of crisis can be emotionally overwhelming. A lot of people need not to feel anything very much, because they’ve got so much to do. Dissociation can be the thing that’s keeping them safe. If they want practical help – using your phone to contact services, filling in forms, borrowing your car to get to an appointment – and shy away from your sympathetic ear, let them be. Don’t be surprised if an emotional crash comes later on, sometimes after the drama is supposedly over. I did this with one unit I was in after a period of homelessness, and most of my then friends were confused and a little frustrated with me – wondering why I still wasn’t happy. Delayed reactions aren’t uncommon.

People can also regress, which can scare you if you haven’t experienced it before. Psychological collapse can happen where they freeze and stop looking after themselves at all. Sometimes people wind up in psychiatric services at this point. They may become wildly manipulative and unpredictable as their sense of desperation spirals. They may also just disappear and try to manage on their own. Anything is possible, the stress is intense.

Lastly, one of the things a home base does is keep a safe place somewhere in the world where you are loved, and thought well of. However dark it may get elsewhere, somewhere you are treated with dignity. Like anyone in bad circumstances, a massive amount of victim blaming happens. Our culture is not kind to people who’ve suffered this kind of tragedy, we have a lot of terms for poor people and few of them are something you could maintain a sense of self worth and identity with. Experiences like homelessness assault our sense of safety, our expectations of our lives, and our identity. Home base can at least be a place where our identity is preserved, where we remain a friend rather than a ‘homeless person’. Anything that buffers us against the acid erosion of self will help. Anything that helps us to function more as a traveler does, with some dignity and a keen sense of the absurd, will help. Meaning, hope, acceptance, these are things that help people get through dark times.

Homelessness & Poverty

Sep 2, 2013May 25, 2015 / Sarah K Reece / 10 Comments

There’s an interesting conversation going on over on Amanda Palmer’s blog about the difference between asking and begging. They’re talking about it from the perspective of the relationship between artists and fans, crowd funding vs labels and agents, which interests me a great deal as an artist, but I’m also interested in the ideas as a person who’s been homeless.

Homelessness is one of the most screwed up, misunderstood, pervasive mess of a thing in our world. It’s a monster we don’t really even begin to understand. It’s something I’m wrestling with as I try to make life decisions about housing. It’s changed me in ways I’m still coming to terms with. I’ve never slept rough but I’ve run from violence. My girlfriend Rose has done both, first on the streets at 13. I’ve slept in shelters, on couches, in my car, and lived in a caravan park. There’s two big, complex, deeply unfair aspects to homelessness that most people do not appreciate when they give the topic a cursory glance:

We have an absolutely bizarre, expensive, exclusive, complex system of housing. No other animal on earth has to spend a third or more of their lives working to own a home. Only a couple of hundred years ago, here in Australia we were settled by people who built their own homes from wattle and daub and whatever other materials they could find, in an act that is now illegal. Indigenous Australians certainly didn’t spend most of their lives trying to afford basic shelter. We have created this problem.When I had nowhere to live it was illegal for me to squat in disused housing. Illegal for me to sleep in my car on public property. Illegal for me to put up a tent on the beach, in a park, or by the side of the road. Illegal for me to find shelter in stairwells, drains, porches, bus stops, or emergency waiting rooms at hospitals. Illegal for me to camp out in the backyard of a friend in public housing. Illegal for me to stay more than a month at most caravan parks. We have made housing extremely difficult to attain for a lot of our population, while making being homeless illegal.
Homelessness is not just about shelter. It is also about community. To be in a place where I am sleeping in my car means I have run out of social support. I have no friends who own investment properties they can rent out to me. I have no family willing or safe or in the same country. I have no mates who can drag out the sofa bed. We do not solve this problem merely by providing shelter to people, because if you’ve been homeless for awhile, you change. Your social world changes. You make friends on the streets. Most people learn how to steal food and basic supplies because getting welfare without a fixed address and a lot of paperwork is extremely difficult. Once you’ve adapted to that world, being dropped alone into an empty unit with no furniture, no community, and the culture shock of a world that includes a shower every day and a toothbrush is overwhelming. Many people go back to what they know. It took me over a year to get back my basic routines like brushing my teeth, for them to be easy and automatic processes I went through every day. That process was filled with shame and loneliness.

Homelessness has changed me. The cost was extremely high. It alienated me from my own society in ways I’m still struggling with. I hated everyone who had a place of their own, somewhere to keep their belongings safe, somewhere safe to sleep, a hub where they could sit behind windows and look out at the world and decide what they were going to do, and when, and how. Being homeless was about constant change, moving from one place to the next. It was about loss – my belongings, my pets, my garden. It was about failure – having to withdraw from uni studies because it was impossible to sustain them. Life becomes day to day, about survival, about where is the next meal coming from. Driving around Adelaide with a cardboard box of food as my pantry. Living on sandwiches from the service stations. Homelessness was about desperation and fear and shock.

I begged services for help. I rang every single service I could find and begged. There was no asking. Asking can accept a yes or no. I needed. I begged. I was told no. I got into free counselling at a local clinic. The counsellor told me there are empty beds in empty houses all through Adelaide. I just have to be persistent enough to get one. Keep ringing them. Insist. I keep ringing them. I was refused. Over and over. I was four months too old to access the youth homelessness program. Frustrated workers got angry with me, implied that it was my fault I was homeless. They told me that 26 year old people don’t become homeless. They told me that no one cares if they do. Told me I could sleep in the parklands. Told me to stop calling. The humiliation was unbearable. I stopped begging.

With my friends, I didn’t even ask. I couldn’t bear to. I knew that I’d beg, and that if they said no, I wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye again. Wouldn’t be able to pull a blanket of deniability over my pain and shame. I figured that if anyone had a resource they could share, they’d offer it. I embarrassed no one. When sleeping on couches, I left when asked. I didn’t cry, didn’t beg, didn’t ask for another night. Somewhere in my heart is a frozen scream that makes it almost impossible to love, or forgive, or believe in other people. Shame and rage.

Asking vs begging.

Asking comes from a place where the other person is free to say yes or no. Begging comes from need, from desperation. I want to be in a world where I’m never begging. I want to be in a world where all my friends are always free in how they respond to me, where they offer from love, deny from love, where guilt and fear and shame and power never enter our relationships. Because my homelessness was not their doing, and their burdens were already many. We tangle want and need in our culture, use the same terms for both. Need is raw, and harsh, and when we speak from it, it sears us. We’re ashamed of it and we feel deeply betrayed when other people don’t hear that we’re not asking, we’re begging. Ask anyone who’s ever been life-threateningly ill and watched most of their friends drift away. We’re used to being able to ask. Begging, when we’re forced to it, is something else entirely.

Begging, and the loss of dignity that comes with it – for the one who begs and the one who is begged of, is the reason we have welfare.

A poor man, as distinct from a complete pauper, has at least some sort of dwelling and he does not dress in rags but respectably. Poverty can be noble, by pauperage is repulsive… You are the powers that be, and your primary responsibility is to ensure that every inhabitant of this province has a piece of bread and roof over his head, since without these basic necessities man cannot have any dignity, and a man without dignity is not a citizen. Not everyone can be rich… but everyone must be fed – not only for the sake of the destitute but for everyone else’s sake as well, so that they do not have to hide away shamefacedly from the poor as they eat their fine white bread. Those who feast in the midst of wailing and misery will not be dignified.

from Pelagia and the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin.

It’s the reason we need a radical shake up of how our housing works. We don’t have to have the system we are used to. Many other places in the world use completely different approaches to housing, housing where all homes are owned by the state, and all tenants are paying to own rather than to rent. Housing that can be built by communities or individuals, and cost a few months wages rather than 10 years. I’m not saying it’s easy or that all the alternatives work, issues with tent city slums and high rise ghettos are terrifying. But what we have is appalling, we have maintained the dignity of the housed by keeping the homeless in our midst invisible.

We can also look at a community and culture change. I remember once speaking with a lovely hippy girl at a party. When the topic of homelessness came up I talked about how painful it was when a worker told me derisively that I was lucky to have a car to sleep in, with the implication that I had no right to whine because so many other people had it worse. The hippy gave me an odd look and told me that, well, I WAS lucky to have a car to sleep in. I felt punched in the gut.

I’ve thought it over a lot since and come to consider that community is probably the difference between her situation and mine. When you are part of a broad network such as the hippy subculture, home isn’t bricks and mortar. Ownership isn’t the same. Some degree of nomadic travelling is normal. Barter trade for handmade goods is normal. WWOOFING (working for rent) is normal. Home is your friends, is your experiences, is your capacity to offer something to that community and to rely on it.

This is not what I experienced because I lost almost my entire social network through relationship breakdown and domestic violence. I didn’t have a sense of family anymore, much less an extended one. I had nothing to trade or barter because I was exhausted, extremely sick, and in severe mental and emotional pain. I had no safe hub to keep precious belongings. I had no idea what the next week, month, or 5 years held for me. I lived on the edge of my life, with a tenuous hold on the world, fighting to survive and chronically suicidal. I was disabled by chronic physical illness and barely able to care for my basic needs. The first time I was homeless I had not yet been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I was a switchy, confused mess, drowning in a dissociative crisis. When my car broke down one night driving back to a flat I rented with the help of a friend for a year, there was no one to call, no money for the RAA. I walked kilometres home in the small hours of the night, alone and afraid to a unit that I could not afford to stay in for long although I loved it dearly. On another occasion, I was on the run with a family member who was in the grip of a mental breakdown. I stayed for the allowed 2 weeks in a motel organised by a domestic violence service. At night I would lie in the bed, listening to the sounds of glass breaking as the men came to the motel, which was well known as a cheap local place that women on the run were housed, and reclaimed their women. During the day I fought with the mental health services to find care for my desperately suicidal family member, and tried to coax them to eat anything. There was a screaming pain in me that never went away.

Begging changes you. Every support I accessed, every bit of generous assistance I was offered by friends or by services, frightened and humiliated me. There’s a bitterness and a terror of being beholden to other people that has profoundly affected my capacity to engage with other people. My experiences with services were brutal and degrading. After being in a homelessness shelter in 2006, I made the call that next time, suicide would be higher on my list of personal responses to homelessness than seeking support from a shelter. I was surprised by people’s sympathy for my life in a caravan park, which was often peaceful, and their assumptions that a shelter run for women escaping domestic violence would be safe and peaceful, when my experiences with the staff were anything but. They refused to allow me to bring my scooter even though I was very ill and unable to walk far unaided. On cleaning days we were locked out of the facility and told to walk into town. Unable to walk that far I sat in the gutter and cried. I watched as young women who had bravely fled their known, but violent, lives for the total unknown of a DV shelter with two bags of clothes get housed in boarding facilities full of older violent men with criminal histories and drug addictions. Such courage rewarded with such suffering. For this, we are expected – we are required – to be grateful. We exchange the brutality of domestic violence for state sponsored violence against our dignity for which we are to blame and for which we should be grateful.

When I was incoherent with rage, a friend once summed up my own feelings for me; I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

Another friend once kindly drove me around Adelaide in a heatwave to buy me one of the last evaporative (water cooled) air conditioners going because my health problems were causing me to suffer chronic heat stroke. I sat in the car in a frozen state, unable to speak, my hands dripping with sweat from anxiety, feeling like I was going to vomit, as around and around my brain two voices looped endlessly: “What is this going to cost me?” and “I hate myself“. My response to their generosity was terrified withdrawal, silence, an inability to tolerate touch or make eye contact for months. I remember stuttering as I forced myself to look them in the face to say thankyou when they left, hoping that somewhere through my terror I’d been polite, that I’d communicated that I appreciated their gift. There’s no dignity in this.

A generous friend who’d helped with money over and over during my homelessness once visited to say sorry for not offering to house me when I had nowhere to go. And I couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t reply, because by saying it they’d broken my pact not to look it in the face. How then could I respond? I had no words to explain the mess inside of me, that I loved them for their kindness, and envied them their house, and hated them for having what I did not, and felt grateful and blessed and humiliated by their care, and worthless, and that I forgave them, and that I could not forgive them or anyone else for the suffering I’d been through while they had not, that my world has collapsed while theirs continued, and that I hated myself and wanted to die and felt broken beyond mending and unworthy and defiant and furious about issues between us I couldn’t resolve because I owed them too much to make any criticism of them, and that I had words for none of this.

How to speak of the nights where the ghosts of everyone in my former life came and stood my bed as I tried to sleep, and tormented me in nightmares? How to speak of my rage when new friends told me that things would be okay now, when I knew my life was built on dandelion and would blow away in the next breeze, like it did, leaving me homeless again. The raw intense rage and pain I was always swallowing down and trying not to show. The Gap between me and the rest of the world. My desperation not to destroy the few relationships I had left. I was paralysed. Living in agony amidst regular lives and trying to hide the signs so that I wouldn’t be rejected. Most of my friends – for various reasons – trying to do the same.

Homelessness and poverty. Asking and begging. Alienation and community.

Sitting in my public housing unit now, watching the afternoon sun grow golden against the far wall. There’s a hate in me that would do violence against even the good people, a dog that bites the hand that feeds. I understand the rage of the disenfranchised, the place where dreams and dignity break and all that remains is an empty amusement at the world of attachment – at people so hopelessly invested in their lives that they hurt when you take things from them. These are the young on our streets, setting fires, breaking windows, tearing apart what little safety we’ve been able to craft for ourselves. They are part of the chaos and the pain now, it speaks through them and moves their hands to spread the night.

How to find grace in this place? I have been a poor leper, shrinking from touch.

The Lepers Who Let Us Embrace Them
by Kathy Coffey

Youthful, healthy, oozing joy,
Francis gets the credit.
Yet what of one who watched
him coming, dreading charity?

Which one is named saint? One rose
beyond hostility and shame to grace.
Centuries owe the leper thanks; he,
compassionate, accepted Francis’ kiss

(see the whole poem here)

How to forgive myself? How to forgive anyone? How to build a life from this, this wreckage, more, this black earth, so rich and fertile. Where lies our security? Where is my home? How do I, as a person who is often sick, who needs welfare to survive, who lives in this culture, this strange world, live and make choices with dignity? Asking vs begging.

Long grow the shadows into the light.

Psychosis

Aug 13, 2013Jan 19, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

I sometimes have issues with temporary, stress related psychosis. This is very common in many conditions such as PTSD. In my case, I tend to hallucinate. My reality testing is usually intact (which means I’m aware that what’s happening isn’t real). I also become quite dissociative, have panic attacks, and may struggle with mild paranoia. All these things tend to feed into each other – eg the more anxious I am, the more psychotic experiences I have, and the psychotic experiences I have, the more anxious I get. I can struggle with this because of physiological stress such as bad reactions to meds, or due to psychological stresses.

Last night was a very bad one for me. Working out what the triggers are for these sudden degenerations can make a very big difference to my ability to predict and manage them. I’m frustrated but hopeful that this will be the case with this situation.

I think that interpersonal stress (eg conflicts in my important relationships) might be another really vulnerable area for me. There’s been a few lately, and yesterday just happened to involve another four conflicts to navigate in relationships important to me. By evening I was shattered and worn out. I went to bed to watch the other half of a movie I’d started last week; Solaris. Last week it was exactly what we needed, thoughtful and soothing. Last night different parts were watching and it fed straight into the high stress.

My peripheral vision filled up with shapes. There was a strong sense of being watched, or of something being behind me. I became profoundly afraid of the dark outside my room – which is unprecedented as a adult. I was afraid of the dark as a child but since PTSD feel safer hidden in the dark than I do trying to sleep in a light room. My anxiety went into overdrive, which is also unusual for me. I’m used to minor hallucinations, they don’t usually come with emotional distress. I did a massive skin flair and broke out in huge hives that antihistamines made no difference to. Insect bites from several days before suddenly swelled up to the size of golf balls. The sense of panic was intense, I was choking on a scream for hours. I struggled to calm myself down but none of my usual approaches worked. It felt like reality was dissembling around me. Knowing that it was me rather than the world that was falling apart had no comfort.

Things moved in my house in the dark beyond my room. If I looked at the dark, nightmares coalesced in front of my eyes. I found myself passing out for micro-sleeps and waking with a scream. My skin prickled and rippled with terror and all my hair stood on end. I felt nausea and I knew that sleep was critical, if I could ride the adrenaline it would start to ebb and I’d probably sleep deeply at that point. Lack of sleep amps psychosis. I just needed to stay this side of total terror, otherwise I’d have to get ACIS or someone else to intervene. I was close to that point. I was able to fall asleep in the end. I woke to my alarm for a planned meetup with friends today to sort out my paperwork. It turns out it had been cancelled due to illness, which is probably for the best. I wish I’d had the extra sleep.

Rose turned up this morning and I didn’t recognize her. I knew who she was but she had no familiarity to me at all. I explained what was going on and told her about all the relationship conflicts. She’s supported other people in this place and knows how to connect and be calming. When I close my eyes, I start dreaming immediately, seeing things in the dark. I can’t look at a dark room without seeing things in it. I’m dreaming while awake, which is still the best description I’ve ever heard of psychosis. I stay in bed all day, talking with Rose. She brings me small meals of things I can keep down. Food is also essential to reduce the impact of psychosis. We keep the room light, we talk about the future, about good things I’m looking forward to. She’s not afraid of me. The fear eases. I try to nap, but when I close my eyes the visions start instantly. I lose my sense of place, feel like I’m falling, like I’m fraying apart. When I check facebook, I see a friend struggling with psychosis. I message them with these suggestions, a few possible different ways of engaging a psychosis:

1. Grit your teeth, keep your head down, and get through it, because it is temporary and will pass.
2. Do major stress management; take time off work, go for longs walks, hot baths, go away for a few days (tell someone if you’re going to do that!) whatever would reduce stress for you
3. Get help to break the spiral of high stress > poor sleep > psychosis > high stress… Anti psychotics are actually major tranquillisers, they can be really helpful in the short term to get some rest and break the spiral. Any other things that help you to get decent sleep and keep decent amounts of food happening will also help you to not spiral and heal instead.
4. Emotionally connect with others to communicate emotional distress, which often drives this stuff, and to get safe reality checks.

I read some James Herriot to Rose – it’s gentle and has no supernatural themes. I have a horrible headache. I drink a lot of fluids and take mild pain relief. The fibro pain is bad. Rose rubs pain relief gel into my back very gently. When the anxiety gets low enough I find I can lie next to her and close my eyes. The visions don’t frighten me, they’re just dreams. I fall into them and sleep for a couple more hours. It helps.

My mind feels like it’s made of crystal, fragile, humming with it’s own energy, needing to be held gently. I feel calmer, fragile but calm. My peripheral vision is still full of shadows. I’ll sleep with the lights on tonight. I keep the tv running. It will pass.

Follow up – Where does my psychosis come from?

Safe Sex 6 Communication & Consent

Aug 1, 2013Nov 27, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I come from a highly conservative background where our sexual health information was entirely about abstinence, and based on fear of pregnancy, disease, and shaming. Sex was talked about as sacred, but basically seen as a commodity that had the highest value the first time you traded it, and depreciated rapidly. We did the whole ‘hand a rose around the room and fondle the petals until they fall out’ exercise my school. I was never supported to develop a language to feel comfortable communicating about sex, because the model of sex I grew up with assumes that I would never need it – I would remain a chaste virgin until I was married, then I would instantly become happily sexual and permanently available for sex with my husband. There was an assumption that ignorance about sex and an inability to communicate about it would possibly more likely keep me from having it until marriage. This model lacked the idea that I would still need to be able to communicate consent, comfort, pleasure, enthusiasm, or any other needs or feelings even once married. I once sat through sex education at a camp, as a ‘youth leader’, listening to the talk for the young boys, which was outside, round a campfire, with a bunch of adult men basically saying “Sex is awesome, don’t do it until you’re married”, and then to the talk for the girls, which was inside, everyone sitting at individual desks in a classroom, while the adult women said “Sex is risky and you could get pregnant, don’t do it until you’re married”. I was so angry that we were not telling girls sex is awesome, that they got the ‘sex is scary’ story, that I folded the paper handouts into airplanes and threw them at the presenter until I was thrown out of the room. I had no language other than this to communicate my frustration and distress.

Many of us grew up with variations of these ideas where communication about sex is unnecessary, and they have been cast in a romantic glow – that if it’s ‘real love’ your partner will just ‘know’ what you want and like, or that a ‘real’ wo/man knows how to satisfy a wo/man. That if you’re in love you will be perfectly sexually compatible and never need to negotiate that. That all ‘decent’ people like the same sexual behaviours and therefore never need to communicate about their desires. On the other hand, sometimes these ideas have been taught to us with a brutal resignation – I was once advised by a female friend that “it takes a long time for women to get used to sex, and I don’t think they ever really enjoy it”. Tolerating miserable sex is seen as being grown up and understanding that real life isn’t like the movies. This is really sad.

These kinds of ideas can make it challenging to communicate about sex! But, there is a big difference between privacy and shame. The former is a part of our healthy function as people, the latter is painful and destructive. Many of us (me included!) feel embarrassment and uncertainty when we try and talk about sexual stuff. That’s okay! My experience has been that if you can untangle embarrassment from shame then it’s not such a big deal. I talk about sex quite a lot, here on my blog, in my relationships, and in appropriate ways with people I help support in my mental health or queer supports work. In fact, it turns up as a topic all over the place, even in my work as an eating disorder peer worker. Sexual health and needs are not side issues in our lives, they are often key foundations in our relationships and health and happiness. However, I still get embarrassed! I still blush – I’m part German and have fair hair and white skin, my blush response can be pretty incredible! You don’t have to be some kind of emancipated modern person to learn how to communicate about sex. 🙂 It does get easier with time and practice.

Part of this is about education. I started reading and learning about sex, anatomy, being queer, child development, and so on as a young adult because I needed a broader framework than I’d been provided with in my upbringing. I remember the intense shame and self loathing I experienced as a young person, and the fear that myths and misinformation created in me. I had a vision of a future in which I would not be trapped anymore in the shame, terror, self hate, loneliness, and awful double binds about sex I had been living in. I was taught women are not interested in sex – so when as a young person I naturally started to mature sexually, I thought of myself as deviant and evil. I was taught that being gay is wrong so I feared and suppressed my natural interest in other girls. I was taught that once a man is aroused he “reaches a point of no return” where he cannot stop sex, so I learned that I was not permitted to stop or change my mind once a sexual act had begun. I was taught that after marriage a woman’s body belonged to her husband, so she cannot deny him sex. I was taught that if an adult man touches a girl child that is abuse, but if the genders are reversed no harm can be done. I was taught that men cannot be raped, and that women cannot be sexual abusers. I experienced peer based sexual abuse that was not seen as abuse by anyone I sought support from because the others involved were also young people, so I learned that what happened to me didn’t count, and the trauma reactions I suffered were simply me over reacting or being a drama queen. I witnessed sexual abuse, the entangling of sex and violence, sex and shame, punishment, sadism, entitlement, and humiliation. I became a repository of horror stories as other people confided secrets to me. I became a silent witness to peers helplessness in engaging their own sexual abuse, unwanted abortion, and incest. I was trapped in a nightmare mess of conflicting messages about sex through which I attempted to mature into an ethical, passionate, adult sexual woman. The result was disastrous and life threatening, an intense inner conflict and self hatred, warped frameworks about sex, relationships, and consent, and a clash between unbounded desires and terror. All of this happened in secrecy and silence, without a language to communicate, with no way of understanding what went wrong or how to set things right.

What I did have was this vision of myself as someone who was no longer afraid. Someone who could use correct anatomical terms without stuttering, who was comfortable with their own sexuality. Someone who might even have great sex, who could talk about it, ask for what they wanted, navigate consent, explore, explain, support, nurture, and adventure. It wasn’t a clear vision and I couldn’t believe in it all the time but by this star I set my course and began to inquire.

We need a language to be able to even think clearly about any of these areas. Communication and consent are profoundly connected ideas, without the ability to communicate, consent is not possible, and without the knowledge that we are allowed to express or deny consent, we have no foundation for our communication skills. So where do we start? Building communication skills in this areas started for me with a language I could engage.

Find a language you like for everything about sex. When you spend time with a sexual partner, work on a language you both like! What words do you both feel good about for your bodies, for different sex acts, for toys, lubes, for asking if the other person is interested in sex, for boundaries around what you are consenting to, the whole works. For some people this is pretty easy and there’s not a lot of hassle. For others many words or terms are highly negatively charged and you may need to be creative to come up with ways of communicating about sex that are fun, respectful, useful, and don’t increase stress. It doesn’t matter if this private language makes no sense whatever to anyone else, as long as it works for whoever is involved with sex with you.

You need to be able to clearly communicate nuances, because sex and consent is more than yes/no! This is kind of frustrating considering that a whole lot of our culture hasn’t really wrapped their brain around the idea of yes and no yet! There’s a whole conversation here, the need to be able to communicate things like “It’s late, let’s go to bed, naked is good, lets kiss and cuddle but I’m not in the mood for anything else” or “Yes, I’d love to have sex, but I feel like this or this and not that (kind of sex) today”, or “How do you feel about trying this new (toy/position/game/whatever) today?” or “I’d really like to sleep alone tonight, don’t take it personally, I’m not upset with you and I’d love to have you over again on Friday if that works for you?” or “I know you’re not feeling into sex tonight, but I’m really worked up, do you mind if I take care of myself in bed while you hold me?”. If you’re not used to this, these conversations are hard at first. Whether you’re setting the scene with a new sexual partner or trying to introduce more communication into an existing relationship, it can be scary and awkward and stressful. But then, so can sex without communication.

People who engage in types of sex that are risky use back up forms of communication to make sure everyone stays safe. This might sound a bit silly, but if you have any concerns about communication this can be a wise idea for any kind of sex. Some of us struggle to say things clearly. Terms that require a high level of confidence and assertion can be difficult. They can also be tangled with unintended meanings. So, where ‘stop’ might be difficult to say, and feel confronting and rejecting when all the person is trying to say is ‘please pause for a moment, I need to gather myself’, or ‘sit up a bit, I can’t breathe well’, a safe word can be less challenging.

Practice it! If you have high anxiety or difficulty with boundaries, you may really struggle with this. So, silly as it sounds, practice it with your partner or with each partner. Sit on the bed, have a massage, and say your safe word. Touch stops, and then starts up again when you ask for it. If verbal communication is sometimes compromised – due to disability, anxiety, dissociation, switching, or anything else – have a ‘safe touch’ that is used the same way. It needs to be easy and simple – a pinch, tapping the other person twice, clicking a ring against the bedhead… This is especially relevant for any form of sex where you can’t see other person’s face. It can be difficult to tell sometimes if the breathing or sounds are pleasure or distress, and that uncertainty can add a lot of unnecessary anxiety to sex. You need easy ways to check in that don’t feel too awkward – “Are those happy sounds?”. Especially if you or your partner have a lot of stress around sex and communication issues like this – checking in needs to become the norm to keep sex emotionally safe.

Don’t let anything make you feel awkward because of this, I know that we never see this in movie sex or sex in books. It is critical that you both want what is happening, that neither has frozen and that sex is not migrating between consensual and abusive. We as a culture are still struggling to understand that this happens, and we don’t give people the tools we need to navigate sex and keep it good. Safe sex doesn’t just mean stopping when they say no, it’s about not doing anything they haven’t said yes to, and about learning how to communicate no, and yes, with enthusiasm and without shaming.

This isn’t the final word on this topic, in fact it barely scratches the surface. Communication about sex is linked to but also distinct from our communication skills in other areas. Assertiveness is part of this but also insufficient – we shouldn’t have to be highly assertive, we should be working to create safer environments where it’s easy to communicate even if we’re feeling very vulnerable. If you’re interested in exploring ideas about the nature of consent further, I suggest reading “Yes means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape” by Friedman and Valenti. I hope that my simple, if unusual, suggestions might start you thinking about these topics in your relationships, and help you come up with creative ways to build in more, and easier, forms of communication about sex.

This article is part of a series about emotionally safer sex. Try also reading

7. Find Freedom

Wrist Poem – Broken

Jul 25, 2013Jan 10, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I hit a couple of triggers tonight that flipped us from content and coping to wildly distressed in a heartbeat. My brain is full of screaming pain. This is my new wrist poem:

It reads: “Some nights, it has to be okay to be broken… to be without hope… not to believe…”

Safe Sex 5 Reset the norms

Jul 13, 2013Jun 4, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

In our culture we have the idea that a relationship is a linear progression from strangers to intimacy, from distance to closeness, from a touch on the hand to ‘home base’. We also think that you never lose ground you’ve gained. Once you’ve reached second base, second base is always available. Once you start having sex, or seeing each other naked, or kissing in public, those are now always allowed and to be expected. This does not make sex safe. If one or both partners have any kind of anxiety around sex, this pressure, the awareness of these norms being set to new places, dramatically increases the stress because even after a great time together, they will now have to either put up with contact they don’t want, or fend off a partner who thinks this is the new norm, whenever they don’t feel comfortable with it.At the extreme, this assumption of the new ‘normal’ between you, what is okay and acceptable and to be expected, becomes a sense of entitlement. We might not mean it that way, or think very much about it, but it’s pretty easy to start making assumptions and to treat sex like something we are owed. People who, for whatever reason, already feel anxious or unsafe about sex, can be highly sensitive to this dynamic. It may not stop them having sex, but it can certainly stops sex feeling safe.

I’m not being naive here, and this is not about desire discrepancy – the partner with a higher sex drive is not bad or wrong. This is about the way you engage sex. This is about both of you always having the right to say no and not be shamed, as much as the right to suggest sex and not be shamed! This isn’t about building sexual rejection into your relationship. It’s about not building in entitlement, unawareness, or distress. We do not have the right to coerce our partners into having sex with us. We have the right to feel desire, attraction, and arousal. We have the right to want sex. We have the right to make choices about who we want as a partner, who we want to be sexual with, how we want that relationship to work, but I do not believe we have the right to demand sex, from anyone, ever. That belief and those values are part of what help me to be a safer sexual partner, and to require emotionally safer sex from my partner.

Sometimes when I talk about this idea with people, there’s fear. People get anxious that if their partner is truly that free to refuse sex, they would never have sex. People get anxious that if they refuse to have sex with their partner, their partner will have it with someone else, or leave them. There’s ideas about owing each other sex, that having sex once implies a contract that you will have it again, or that certain types of relationship choices – such as moving in together – mean you are now permanently available for sex and lose your freedom to decline. Push these ideas a little further and we move into rape apologist territory – that what you wear signals that you’ve decided to have sex, that the person who pays for the night out is owed sex, that if you’ve kissed you’ve offered an un-revokable consent to sex, and so on. I get some of these ideas and how pervasive they are- mainly because I’ve been severely tangled in them at times myself. And I’ve suffered, and I’ve hated myself. I know what it feels like when there is terror, shame, self-loathing, guilt, obligation, rebellion, recklessness, misery, and humiliation choking me during sex.

Here’s the nub. If you or your partner feels like this during sex – it’s not really sex. We have other words for sexual experiences where one person enjoys themselves while another one screams inside. I’ve learned that not having sex is far, far better than having bad sex. Sometimes people are shocked by my many years of voluntary celibacy. It’s almost a taboo in our culture to make a choice like that – not for lack of opportunities, or for lack of desire, but to chose to decline sex. (Of course, there’s nothing particularly special or holy about it either, and it’s certainly not better than anyone else’s choices. It was just what I wanted at the time.) I’ve made stupid decisions in the past that any sex was better than none. I’m old enough now to be wiser about that. I’m wise enough to want no more bad memories about sex.

There’s another way, and it might feel frightening or radical, like it opens the door to rejection or a total lack of sex. I’ve found that for me, it has the opposite effect. Sex is not a contract but a song, a dance, flight.

So, try to reset the norms each time, back to dating, back to checking. It might feel stupid, as we have almost no cultural support for this idea. The higher the level of anxiety and the more communication difficulties you or your partner have, the more important this is. Don’t assume anything. Sex last night doesn’t mean sex tonight. Nakedness being fine yesterday doesn’t mean you can wander in and brush your teeth while they’re in the shower the next morning. Don’t force a stressed partner to constantly say no. Assume no first, and check to see if it might be a yes. This approach also gives freedom for people to have difficult reactions after sexual contact. Even if the experience is wonderful, it can stir things up. Breathing room is critical at times. Allow the relationship to move between romantic and platonic. Last night was hot sex. Tonight is cuddles while wearing pajamas. With safety comes freedom. Unless you make it very easy and comfortable for your partner to say no, you are not having safe sex. Unless you make it safe to initiate sex without being shamed, you are not having safe sex.

As a multiple, this need to reset norms and check again is especially important, as I switch to non-sexual parts or to child parts. Properly covering non-sexy clothes or PJ’s are worn on nights when my child parts are around, or are kept next to the bed in case they turn up unexpectedly on other nights. Nakedness does not cue sex – sometimes it is platonic. For my system this is critical, it reduces shame and stress about sharing a bed, a bathroom, and life with another person when some of the time Sarah is a child, or a guy, or someone who’s not in a sexual relationship with my partner.

Resetting the norms doesn’t have to be horrible – anxiety ridden, stressed, depressing. It can be sexy as hell. If you’ve never done anything like this it will take time to find your rhythm and get comfortable but it does get easier. Talk it through. Find what works for you both. Own your own desires and let your partner own theirs. Lean over and whisper “You look incredible tonight, can I kiss you?”

You might like this video that links the idea of having sex to music jams:

This article is part of a series about emotionally safer sex. Try also reading

The Convalescence

Jun 30, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’m still awfully sick, but I think I’ve hit the bottom and started to come up. I’m having some difficulty processing the meds so I’ve cut them back to the basic essentials. There’s been a fun evening of mania/weird meds high which is admittedly better than abject misery but as it usually indicates major liver stress it’s important to ease that before less fun symptoms, like half my skin falling off, show up. The upshot of this is I’m less giggly than I was last night but the pain level is a fair bit higher than I like. The throat and kidney infections seem to be improving, the chest infection is persistent but not degenerating into pneumonia, which is great. I’ve got an orchestra of bells, whistles, rattles, and wheezes in my lungs but I don’t feel like I’m drowning all the time. The fluid and pressure in my ears is still causing me troubles and wrecking my balance and sense of space. So no driving. In fact, still not a lot of walking. I’m prone to random collapses when the room suddenly flips upside on me. Mood wise I’m erratic, happy one moment and sobbing my heart out the next. I hate being sick! I’m dogged by a sense of misery and failure. Today is supposed to be my final class of Photography at college – I need to call them as I only managed to actually make it to two lessons and certainly can’t catch that all up now. 😦

Ah well. Tonks is delightful, the abscess on Sarsaparilla’s ear has healed up, saving me a vet trip thankfully. Salt water washes and betaine did their job. Zoe is miserably cooped up without her regular walk. Friends have been helping out with meals and chores as they can. Rose helped me find and clean the large puddle of kitten pee from behind the couch. I’m sleeping okay, just not at night. It could be worse!

I’m planning projects for when I feel better – I want to finish planting out all my new little seedlings, hopefully before they die. I’m terribly excited about my sister coming home from her 5 year stay overseas – she’s in the air as I type tonight! I’m planning a re arrange of my house with quite a major reshuffle of my sleep area. I currently have a queensize bed tucked into the small bedroom of my unit. It just fits by being pushed right against the wall on three sides. This has been okay-ish, but I’ve had enough of it. Rose is doing night shifts with her new job, I’m noctural and ill and spending a lot of time in bed, it’s a pain to make it when you can’t walk around it, whoever sleeps against the wall has to climb over the other person to get in or out… and more importantly sometimes the sense of being trapped is just too stressful for either of us to be comfortable in that spot. There’s been a couple of memorable rough nights with screaming nightmares and totally disorientated wakeups that I’m pretty keen not to repeat. We do have the lounge as a backup place to sleep for those nights that trauma stuff or multiplicity stuff makes sleeping in the same bed a bad option, but it’s not our preferred option and some nights we’d like to be in the same bed, we just need to both be able to easily get in and out to be comfortable. It’s worth the upheaval to me to be able to accommodate this kind of deep seated trauma stress.

So, tonight I was roaming my unit with a tape measure, trying to work out where else I could fit my bed. As it turns out, not many places. The master bedroom or the loungeroom are my only options. I’m loathe to pull my studio space in the master bedroom apart, but the lounge presents issues of its own. I’m thinking at this point that I may separate my studio into a couple of different parts and that way be able to move it into different areas. There’s the storage aspect – big shelves of boxes of supplies – I don’t need these to be immediately to hand. It’s sufficient to go and grab the box of supplies for that project at any time. I wish they could go in the shed but unfortunately, it’s not very large, not tall enough to fit the shelves, and most importantly, not waterproof and prone to flooding in winter. Then there’s my ‘wet’ table and big easel – these are for my paints and other wet messy types of art such as gluing or plaster or polymer clay work. Lastly there’s my ‘dry’ table. This is for everything where a perfectly dry, smooth surface on the table is essential, such as ink paintings, and needlework. I’m thinking that the inks for my arts and my journals could all be put together in the bedroom space as I usually do a lot of writing in bed and sketch with inks in my notebooks likewise. It’s a space for poetry and haiga and ink art and wrist poems. Then perhaps the wet art could happen in another area of the house… I’m somewhat tempted to pull all my collection of bookshelves into the small bedroom and turn that into a library/cat tree/nook. It’s got terrible light as the shed blocks the window so it’s not suitable as an art space at all. I do love light and windows, and I’m keen to use mine to their best. I’d love a spot to eat breakfast by a window (in bed is fine!), and a place for art by a window with good light.

Lastly, I need to move my computer area from the nook behind my front door. This is the draughty-est place in my home and I spend too many hours here in the wee morning hours, chilling. Fixing the draught isn’t easy due to unusual design of the door and I’m restless for a change anyway so I’m looking around. Perhaps a computer/library room? It’s fun to plan, even though at the moment the walk to the sink to refill my water bottle is as much as I can manage. Thankfully I still have library books, and a kitten is a constant source of either cuddles or diversion. Life goes on.

Out of Despair 6 – Dreams and Tragedy

Jun 20, 2013Nov 11, 2013 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

We have dreamed large and been shattered when the dreams died. I have learned things I cannot unlearn, like searing coals that have left deep scars. Love is not enough. Life is cruel. People do not get as they deserve. Sometimes the violent prosper and the kind suffer. Sometimes you take big risks and lose it all. Death crushes dreams, sickness brings a grief that isolates utterly. We are vulnerable little bags of blood and bones and our dreams are soap bubbles and glass. Life turns on a dime.

But without dreams, there is no life, no hope, no abundance, no meaning, no joy. Without risk, we have nothing.

Nothing’s safe, except what we put at risk – Le Guin

I understand this well, it’s how I’ve stayed alive when I’ve lost so much faith in the world. But this year, it was not enough. Suddenly we’re dreaming big dreams, like having a child. The kind where I can’t imagine surviving tragedy. Death, illness, loss, all paralyzing me with terror. In the face of these nightmares, a dead child, a dead partner, court taking child from ‘mentally ill’ mother, homophobia, violence, homelessness, loss… I am like a rat in a cage, running frantically but there’s no way out. There’s no way to survive these things.

And that’s the key, there’s no way for your world to continue. It ends. What I’m doing now – this retreat, this bizarre breakdown – the letting go, it’s the letting go of a world that has ended. And you wait, you listen, you follow the small voices, the needs of the soul. And you find another path entirely, one that works for you, with what you have. So if Rose and I lose a child and it tears us apart… we sit and we cry and we say – love, love, this pain is too great, our grief is too different. Let us be free to grieve apart. If she dies and all the world we’d created together is suddenly hollow without her, I retreat, I listen, and I find a new path. Perhaps I leave the home we’d made, I buy a caravan, the child and I go traveling with the market folk, at night we watch the moon.

We are not on the railway tracks. We are free to grieve the death of dreams and make room to have new dreams. So tragedy can be faced, the inevitability of loss can be borne.

The world of structure is important. It is not wrong. It is necessary. It supports my life. Too much of it kills me. Too much of it would have me living a ‘successful’ life, the ‘recovered’ patient, doing things that have long lost meaning for me, empty and lost in my heart. This other wild way is capricious and impulsive and need driven and full of hidden mystery and meaning. People make a lot of sacrifices in their lives hoping that success will make them feel the way I feel when I’m up a tree in the moonlight full of the wonder of my world. These two things should not be divided as they are in my life and my head. They are a whole. The one supports the other. Structure follows dreaming, sustains it, makes sure there is food in the cupboard and a safe place to sleep.

Letting go frees me to dream of different things to what I have known. I have fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that flares and settles and flares again. I can expect that there will be days that I do not get out of bed – as there are now. If I wait until I’m well to be a mother, I will not get the chance. But the despair in my heart when I’ve realised that there will be days Mum doesn’t get out of bed had overwhelmed me. My mother got out of bed even if she was just out of hospital. She’s my whole world of what it is to be a mother. I will fall short. I will be one of those mothers.

So I grieve that vision of motherhood, and let it go. I will reach out to mothers who have disabilities and illnesses. I will find a new vision, where who and how I am, is enough. Where what I am able to offer is worthwhile. I will have a different family, a different life, a different experience of being a mother. This is sad, and it is also freeing. Let go of what does not work, and find something that speaks to me. Enough suffering. Enough diligence. Enough failure.

Instead, the most barely understood glimpse of a life where we live in harmony, where passion and diligence meet, space for dark and light, the strongest and the most vulnerable. Room for madness, permission not to fit in or hide, connection to soul.

It’s a rich life I’ve led. So many experiences, so much I’ve learned. I’ve walked many different worlds, seen so much (attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion). It’s an amazing thing to be alive.

Out of Despair Part 1 – Language is Powerful

Part 2 – Frameworks Free and Bind

Part 3 – The Tribe

Part 4 – The Railway Tracks

Part 5 – The Cave Dwellers and the Golden Light

Out of Despair 5 – The Cave Dwellers and the Golden Light

Jun 20, 2013Oct 1, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Let me tell you another story. There is a grey world, without colour, without trees or living things. Wounded people live in caves, scratching out life from a bare and inhospitable world. Beneath the crust of this world, is a golden light, powerful and full of urgent energy. The cave dwellers can hear it and feel it rising. They fear it greatly, it haunts them. They foresee it bursting through the surface of their world, tearing apart homes and safe burrows, destroying the world they have known. They do everything they can to keep it at bay.

The light is the raw stuff of dreams, of hope, of life force. It seeks the surface with the determination of a plant, with the ferocity of a volcano.There is so much fear here, so much loss.

What if it doesn’t have to stay this way? What if the golden light is exactly what the grey world needs to come back to life, to be abundant and vibrant and nourishing? What if the cave dwellers, instead of living in fear of it, can be the stewards of it? Instead of being haunted by it, they can live in the promise of its song. What if they are the ones who mine into the rock for it? Who guide it into safe passages where it does not destroy? Who direct it so that the changes are good, thoughtful, wise ones? What is there is harmony instead of threat?

Narrative therapy and focusing techniques are something I’ve been exploring, making space to ask questions of myself and find new ways to think about my world, new ways to frame my stories. This is powerful for me.

With this shift comes also the power to face the certainty of loss. I have been terrified of my dreamers, those who fly, who take risks, who rock boats.

Out of Despair Part 1 – Language is Powerful

Part 2 – Frameworks Free and Bind

Part 3 – The Tribe

Part 4 – The Railway Tracks

Part 6 – Dreams and Tragedy