Child Alters/Parts

After doing a lot of thinking last night about the child alter/parts speaking or interacting in therapy you could probably guess that there was a bit of internal turmoil. Many of the older and more protective aspects of myself began to worry and tried to predict the future, making it impossible to conceive of the idea that it could be a possibly helpful and therapeutic intervention of sorts. I couldn’t seem to put it to rest enough to sleep and decided on having a hasty internal meeting with the adult parts first and then with some anxious younger parts. Needless to say the adult portion of the meeting was simply a sound off of fears and anxieties and rather pointless, well it wasn’t pointless just more of a dead end.

I don’t like to admit this but I do actually enjoy coming into an internal meeting with a few child parts. For those of you without DID it can be difficult to explain how you can physically remove yourself from the outside world and step into an internal world and how real it can seem. The power of creativity and imagination is endless. The internal space we have set up inside for child alters is much like a playroom with lots of colors, things to climb on and tons of blocks, crayons, play-doh etc. I think when those parts began to create this safe space they took the idea from the Children’s Hospital Playroom I spent a lot of time in as a child. It’s just tweaked to their perfection.

I gathered them up (not all, just the ones that have a little bit of an attention span and weren’t flipping out) and we sat on a colorful mat in the center of the room in a circle. (I am sounding like I am on drugs, I know) It was strange to bit surrounded by them as it’s not something I typically do. There they were, these small children with smiles, nervous movement and an eagerness I wasn’t so keen on. I looked at each one of them, knowing them in a way that you can only know yourself, remembering each one and their story. I felt a deep sadness and connectedness that was troubling.  Each child part of me, separate yet the same was looking back at me, wanting so badly to speak but it was if they understood why I was there and that they needed to offer patience to me as I struggled to get my words together. Their eyes gave me sincere looks of compassion. I was hesitant because usually about this point I just freak out and decide I can’t talk and I disappoint them, but I knew they expected that but were hopeful it would be different. I quickly remembered that these are not normal kids, they are parts of me that have been through the unimaginable, kids with extreme situations in their histories and feelings and thoughts wise beyond their years.

I began with an apology. One that described my sadness and anger at what happened to them, to me and to us. I acknowledged my weakness and gave a voice to my fears of allowing them into my life. I gave the truth and the honesty they deserved from a long time ago. A few younger parts that were not in the circle originally scooted over sitting behind a few others and paid close attention. Some of the more critical younger parts rolled their eyes and picked at their fingers while a few others leaned in to listen more carefully. I continued on telling them how unfair all of this is, and how unfair it is to them that I am not ready for all of what is to come. I explained that while this is a huge step for me that I know fear and anxiety may make it difficult for me to follow through with any plans we may come up with and that I hoped they still had some forgiveness left in them. Some smiled and nodded, others I don’t think understood.

After speaking for several minutes I opened it up to them, allowed them to have their voice and listened as attentively as they had. A few spoke out in anger at my ‘sudden involvement’ and said flat out that they had no reason to trust me. Some others spoke about their fears of my past disappointments and others were already excited at the idea of being allowed to meet Therapist. A couple were still stuck in the past experiences with treatment providers and stuck to their dissociation from Therapist. They all spoke and bantered for quite some time. I waited until there seemed to be a decent break and suggested we talk about boundaries in therapy. The oldest child part in the room immediately spoke up with words that could only make me smile at their intelligence and recognized those same thoughts as ones I’ve had many times:

“You want to tell us about boundaries and stuff because you think you can make us all act like you there. If you want us there then you have to have ALL of us without your rules. You had a chance to go through it, we didn’t. We can figure it out as we are there, we don’t want your rules.”

He was right. My boundaries discussion was my way of trying to control the situation, not for their own good. Hmmph. I stood corrected and acknowledged my infraction. It’s true, if they are going to learn and heal it will be uncomfortable for me to watch them test and dabble in things. I have to be willing to tolerate it and then talk about it without running away in shame. We moved on to discussing how we could introduce parts to Therapist and I heard a lot of feedback on who needed the attention and special care of Therapist. It’s impossible to decide something like that because obviously they all exist because of an extreme dynamic of circumstance. They are all wounded and all need help.  During all the chatter I was overwhelmed by them, so I began to tune out a bit and my eyes settled on a very young part that was sitting behind the circle, kind of perched on ground. She was ‘drawing’ with her finger imaginary pictures on the ground. She was so small and fragile looking and I felt sad. Occasionally she would look up and smile as if she knew what the conversation was about but I didn’t think she really knew. As the child parts began to exhaust the conversation they were moving around each other and rough-housing, a few times she got knocked into but she ignored them. I quietly asked a younger part near me who the little one was, and she rolled her eyes and told me the name. I was surprised because I knew of this part and was always afraid of her, and there she was, small and non-threatening, and I already felt compassion for her. I asked her to come over to sit with me. She seemed terrified so I waited patiently. Eventually we made it over to a more quiet space and we talked. She was eager to meet Therapist but seemed afraid at the same time. I enjoyed talking with her as she was a delightful yet wounded little person.

It is settled that she will be first to enter the therapy room and I feel confident that it will be the right choice for all of us. Its strange to be in this space now, where I am contemplating this exposure and vulnerability, but I am glad that I had this meeting with the younger parts of myself. I feel more in control and more positive and also proud that I told them about my fears. This is not going to be easy and on some level we all need some understanding.

Attachment

In an attempt to stay connected with Therapist while she has been away and back and away again (with yet another LONG vacation in about 2 weeks) I began to read some of the e-mails we have sent back and forth over the past 3-4 years from a suggestion she made to do so. I continue to be amazed at the level of compassion she has and wonder why my experience of her can be so dramatically different when I begin to feel disconnected from her.

I have decided to try and approach a topic that Therapist has brought up on several occasions but I have such increased stress and anxiety over the topic I avoid it as if it would kill me to consider. The topic is attachment. Surprisingly enough, I studied quite a bit of psychology in college and strangely when the Mary Ainsworth attachment theory topic came up I entered my first psychiatric hospital. Hmmm. Surely there is no connection there. I don't remember much of my class during that time but I do know that the week of my admission a paper was due on my understanding of anxious-ambivalent attachment styles. I had blocked all my studies of that topic and just recently decided to revisit. I have always been told by providers that I have an amazing ability to connect with people even after all I have been through and now I am considering that not because I am just awesome (smirk) but more a symptom of my inability to connect normally.

Disorganized Attachment
A frightened caregiver is alarming to the child, who uses social referencing techniques such as checking the adult's facial expression to ascertain whether a situation is safe. A frightening caregiver is usually so via aggressive behaviors towards the child (either mild or direct physical/sexual behaviors) and puts the child in a dilemma which Main and colleagues have called 'fear without solution.' In other words, the caregiver is both the source of the child's alarm as well as the child's haven of safety. Through parental behaviors that are frightening, the caregiver puts the child in an irresolvable paradox of approach-avoidance. This paradox, in fact, may be one explanation for some of the 'stilling' and 'freezing' behaviors observed in children judged to be disorganized.

Human interactions are experienced as erratic, thus children cannot form a coherent, organized interactive template. If the child uses the caregiver as a mirror to understand the self, the disorganized child is looking into a mirror broken into a thousand pieces. It is more severe than learned helplessness as it is the model of the self rather than of a situation. It is important to note that when a child is judged disorganized, he or she is given a secondary best-fitting 'organized' (i.e., secure, ambivalent, avoidant) classification as well. This reflects the fact that attachment disorganization is thought to be a breakdown of an inchoate organized attachment strategy. The degree to which the organized strategy is fragmented however is often different in degree across infants judged to receive a primary 'disorganized' classification.

That is me to a tee. Not only is my attachment completely disorganized but it is also anxious-ambivalent. I struggle with maintaining connections and attachments when people come and go and I definitely struggle to confirm for myself that it is safe when the person I am trying to attach to/with is not directly in front of me to confirm this. I need constant reinforcement that I am ok and that the other party is ok to continue feeling secure. This dynamic is playing itself out currently because Therapist was away for about 10 days a little over a week ago and then went for a 5 day vacation and then has a vacation over two weeks long scheduled in May. She is so in and out that I spend a lot of time being confused and in order to process my confusion I need to section her existence off into one category, either she is ok or she is someone I do not trust. It's a heck of a lot easier to talk myself into believing she is not the person I have known for seven years because it makes me angry and resentful instead of coping with the feelings that I need her and she is unavailable. See the childhood struggle?

As a little girl I was frequently abandoned physically by my mother and everyday emotionally abandoned by her. She was only connected when she felt she wanted to or needed to be. During the disconnect I struggled to create a story in my head about my existence to explain the distance. When my mother was my mother I was ok and I was safe, when she was unavailable I had to get mad at her which was totally unsafe thus I turned it inward to make it about me, as if it were my fault and I became resentful. This made me act out against my mother, my inward rage was directed at her through my physical behaviors until it became too unsafe to do it. I vacillated between extreme hatred of self and hatred of her. I needed her and when she was safe to be around I clung to her for dear life only confusing myself immensely into rage. I never understood why I needed her so much and once I got what I wanted I hated her for it...which evolved into hating myself for it.

If I were a clinician this would be interesting, instead I find myself in widespread panic as this plays out with Therapist. I cannot seem to tolerate the dramatic shifting between feelings with self-talk and reassurance. It is so obvious this past couple of days where I am anxiously awaiting her return, becoming almost excited to count down when I will see her next and then experiencing the THUD in my stomach as the time approaches. I tend to experience this ambivalence so physically that my whole body seems out of control. I want to rip my hair out or comfort myself in my favorite blanket, I have impulses to throw myself into a wall but yet I just want a hug. This has turned into an expression through my eating disorder. I take diet pills and diuretics and then comfort with a meal that I had previously deemed as dangerous, I purge, I stuff and back and forth. I feel confident when I restrict and comforted which turns into fear eventually and eat, then hate myself for doing it.

Of any feeling, ambivalence is the worst for me. I like to organize and have my feelings to be expected and make sense, when I am confused I panic and just want the hell out of it. Because of my disorganization and confusion over Therapist I feel trapped. She is such an important person in my life which I cannot really avoid, so I HAVE to stick through this. I don't see it letting up any time soon so I feel like I am trapped. This leads to extreme thinking which shifts dramatically between depression so severe I don't feel as if I can move, to extreme carelessness where I am so happy go lucky and disconnected that I get myself into trouble. The back and forth feels traumatic and here I sit. Confused beyond belief and just want to die for relief.

I find comfort in stepping outside my life and intellectually picking it apart to find patterns and reasons for why I do what I do, however knowing why this pattern exists brings me more pain in understanding my mother. Analyzing this dynamic only makes me more upset and hurt over how my mother interacted with me and to avoid it I want to go away. Unfortunately therapy is working and I cannot just dissociate the feelings, I have them slightly which is too much even just this tiny bit. It seems my internal system has expired in some way and parts of me are not connected to the present, they are dusty and not as active as I'd like. I cannot just shift into someone else to live my day to day life and I have to strike a balance, this is not something I am good at. I am learning but it's excruciating and I am begging to make it stop.

How do I return to Therapist tomorrow to connect with her when this causes me confusion and panic yet I know I NEED to and I desperately want the safety of her presence. Kind of like the whole idea of cleaning a wound, you know it hurts, you know you have to do it, but it's going to suck so bad and make you doubt why you did it and you'll be pissed because the pain is worse when cleaning it than before when it was dirty, but you rationalize and say the infection that may result will be worse than both...only this isn't a few quick minutes...this is weeks, months and possibly years of cleaning. Damn, this sucks.

Jesus, here we go again. I have that awful anxious feeling, the kind where your stomach feels as if it might just drop out of you and light and sounds are sharp and annihilating. Last night was kind of a spiral that I wish I could have stopped when I realized it was a spiral. I've had quite a bit of time lately to ruminate as I sprained my back and haven't been able to do much other than lay on the floor and hope the vicodin would put me to sleep. I feel shut down and unable to connect to much and it's kind of lonely and has me feeling just plain sad. It's not that I am isolated because I am still talking to people but I just don't feel anything when I am talking.

I was on the phone with my best friend last night and all I could do was barely listen while my head screamed for me to reach out to her, but how? So I eventually went to bed and woke up around 3AM with a terrible nightmare that made me completely crazy. I wanted to run so bad, to leave and just get the hell out of my house but that didn't make any rational sense. So I called my friend back and she talked about animals until I felt sleepy again. Then I woke up at 5AM with a different yet more terrifying dream and I walked around downstairs until I could calm down enough to return to my room. Today nothing seems real or ok and I am just going in circles. Nothing bad is happening to me right now, nothing has happened to me for awhile now but I feel as if it has.

Thinking about Therapist's wedding is literally making me nuts. I want it to go away and just be over but I can't get it out of my head. I feel insane thinking about how to make it go away because I don't want to remember what it feels like to be left. This probably does not make any sense but honestly, the most awful feeling for me is feeling left. I would do anything to not feel it so naturally my brain keeps going to irrational thinking patterns like suicide or just running away. I've never been so afraid of her leaving me and it just doesn't make any sense. In some ways it does but my experience with her for the last seven years tells me otherwise.

While my heart is a shield and I won't let it down
While I am so afraid to fail so I won't even try
Well how can I say I'm alive

If my life is for rent and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine

I keep replaying the times I was left by my parents, mostly my mother. I can see the difference and I know differently but the feeling itself is a trigger. How do I make the feeling different? Not all of these feelings are from my childhood either. I think about the relationships from adolescence and adulthood that I have been left because I wasn't enough for them. I'll never be anything more than a patient to Therapist but honestly, how does the patient let go of the neediness of a person that doesn't need you? I trust her, I do...but what is keeping her attached to me? She doesn't need me.

I need to keep moving. Sitting here typing isn't making this any easier.

7/14 Pre-Therapy

This is going to be shorter than I would like for it to be because I had planned on being at home before therapy this morning but that didn't work. My job called and needed a proposal handled ASAP and I had to go in (which is where I am now). So I apologize now for my lack of thoroughness.

Today I am almost positive we are going to talk about what it would mean to let Therapist be closer to me and allow her to know more of me, more about my mother etc. In response to my post-therapy post, she commented:

"I think you nailed it on the head in the third to last paragraph. (the one about how if you are going to look at your mother for real you are going to have to let me in). Let's talk about that together."

Yeah, so it's pretty obvious that it's where we will begin today, which I don't mind at all, it's just that I cannot exactly explain this stuff to her yet, I don't have a prefabricated response and it's frustrating. But I am going to go in and try and have an open mind. I have suspicions that it won't be a very exciting therapy session, but I guess that is ok too.

7/10 Pre-Therapy

I've been having a terrible time sleeping. It's inconsistent and I am always exhausted. The night before last I slept for over twelve hours, last night I had two hours. What I'd really like to know is who the heck thinks it's ok to mow their lawn at 7:30AM on a Thursday morning? What goes through a persons head when they plan to do such an activity? And what is their rationalization that it's ok? My neighbor (up to this point has been cool, only their annoying dog barking is occasionally frustrating) got the wonderful idea to perform said mowing and it's STILL going. I sleep with the window cracked, and literally their house is like 12 feet away from mine, so we he came up between them it was LOUD. I tried closing the window, it didn't work. I live in one of those cookie cutter neighborhoods where each home has like one square foot between them and a fenced in yard in the back. You'd think it would cross his mind to wait until at least 9AM. Nope. So here I sit, cranky as all get out and anxious to boot.

I have therapy at noon today, and actually I have no idea where our session will lead us. I assume we will be going right back into eating disorder stuff, but you never know when she is going to switch it up and decide she needs to speak with a certain part..or god forbid she has been thinking about something totally random and decides to share it with me. If I had to put money on it though, I am pretty sure it's going to be about my eating disorder. And probably a snippet about my upcoming trip home which we have surprisingly not really talked about yet.

As far as my trip is concerned, I think she feels really strongly that it is something I should not do but she isn't going to tell me that because she is respectful of my decisions about family interactions and probably assumes I am going to do what I want about it anyway. The only comment she made a couple of weeks ago was a short and angry question; "Do you actually think you won't see your mother while you are there?" and that was the end of it. I assume she thinks it will be bad for me, and I will come back to Georgia more messed up than one flew over the cuckoos nest, and she will be left picking up the pieces. How lucky for her that she planned her trip up to D.C. one day after I return from mine. I cannot blame her for her thinking this will turn out badly because last year it certainly did. And when I returned from MD I spent a month inpatient. But that visit was just a set up for bad from the beginning. I planned better this time and had honest two way communication with my siblings about this prior to booking my flight. I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't positive that I'd be safe from my mother. She will not be in the same state as me for the entire duration of my vacation. But seriously, I think my therapist would rather pretend it isn't happening or she will pull her hair out trying to not react to it.

As far as the eating goes, I've lost five pounds in three weeks with no signs of stopping. It's not drastic but my body tends to have a slow start to the weight loss and then kicks into high gear until it simply will not go any lower (which is about 12lbs away from where I am). I've lost my hunger signals that I worked so hard to gain back over the last admission and it's a blessing yet sad at the same time. This time around I am not abusing diet pills or diuretics so the weight loss is actual weight loss and not fluid loss.

Yesterday as I was documenting the day spent with my ED, I began to annoy myself. The rational side of me was flabbergasted at the level of distortion I was experiencing. You know that when you consider one bagel to "just have too many calories" or you consider a binge to be three slices of cheese and a fat free ice cream bar, that you have a problem. Another issue is now that I am so well rehearsed in eating disorder treatment, nutrients, metabolism and everything that goes with it, I feel my methods are more dangerous and could literally screw me over worse this time. I have essentially learned how to mess up my metabolism in a way that produces weight loss. Just starving myself will only get me so far and will take longer because my metabolism will just shut down and begin to store everything I eat, making progress slow. If I go back and forth on the amount of calories I take in then my body never knows what to expect and goes faster and then slower and back to faster again. It's sick...I know.

Anyway, I am annoying myself with this right now. Catch you guys later.