Becoming What I Deserve

Today I emailed my social worker from the youth shelter where I stayed as a young adult. Even once I was housed, I continued to receive support from the organization up until early 2019, at which point I essentially fell off the grid, due to a combination of how overwhelmed I was and the fact that I was stuck in my wheelchair and getting places was extremely difficult. 

After that, I’ve really only had bad news to share, and it felt wrong to reach out only to share that things got so, so much worse for me.

And then, last year I aged out of their services, to further complicate things. He’s not technically my social worker anymore, although the shelter has sort of an open door policy and seems to enjoy hearing from past clients. But again, given all of this, I didn’t want to email about my problems. That doesn’t feel appropriate. 

As I heal from the past few years, I’m on a sort of mission to live a more honest and authentic life. And given that I was in crisis the last time we spoke, I wanted to let him know that I am okay and that things are improving. So I said that in an email today. I mentioned a few good things, like top surgery. And I let him know how much I appreciate everything he did for me for all those years. 

We updated my treatment plan in therapy today. It wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend our session, but my therapist had mentioned it last week and so I brought it up at the beginning of session and suggested we work on that. I don’t remember ever doing this before, although the responses on the old version are definitely in line with things I would say. Maybe a DID thing, but also, I highly suspect that whoever I was working with at the time didn’t present it in such a formal “we need to carve out time to discuss and update your treatment plan” way and just casually asked me some questions. 

While we were working on it, my therapist mentioned that it seems very important at this phase in my treatment for me to be really involved in something like this. Which I appreciate, and I also appreciate her transparency. She explained that the team regularly reviews the treatment plan and that it will be crucial for whoever I am assigned to next. My therapist is an intern who rotates off the team in June. I took this opportunity to check in about an email I sent to her supervisor (which she prompted me to do) asking if the team could consider assigning me to someone more permanently, especially as we’re starting to do trauma work now. She said that’s an ongoing discussion, but it’s good that I brought it up again. Staffing is a bit tough with COVID right now, but I think we are all hopeful that we can make this happen for me. I’ve worked with so many interns (many had six month rotations) and while I have nothing against them, it’s exhausting to have to start over so frequently. 

That basically took up our entire session. Productive and important stuff, but when there is so much going on internally with doing DID work, I am the tiniest bit disappointed that we didn’t have time to talk about that.

I am at the point where I think I need to start explaining a bit about our parts to her, and I am trying to figure out what that should look like. I’m really fine waiting a week to have this conversation, as it feels incredibly vulnerable. It’s information that I used to freely give, but we are much more careful with something like that now. But, I do think that it needs to happen soon. To be clear, we have referenced certain parts that are relevant to the things we discuss in session, but I haven’t used their names or given any identifying info.

It will probably be an email, so that my therapist can refer back to it instead of trying to jot down notes as we speak. I already have worked out that it won’t be too in depth, just a basic overview of who everyone is and the roles they play. I really hate having to say “the part that acts in x way” or something like that instead of just using their name! But I feel like I shouldn’t just start throwing names around without giving her a basic guide to help her keep track of it. 

Other than that, we’re just plugging along. A lot is shifting for us with major medication changes and doing this work in therapy. Some housing stuff is slowly coming together, we’re spending lots of time outdoors, and last night I experienced a helpful sort of switch that helped me to get through a tough night. I generally loathe everything about switching (the loss of control, the confusion that follows, the behavior that isn’t in line with mine, etc.), but this was basically an instance of a part saying “I can help!” and it was immensely beneficial for me to get a break from things. I feel like more switching isn’t exactly the point of doing this work - but I also feel like maybe this is an example of the whole “teamwork” thing. It is what it is, right?

Doing the really difficult, but even more important work (on DID stuff). It gives me hope for us, but it’s absolutely exhausting at the same time. 

There’s a lot of life stuff happening that I don’t feel safe talking about on here. What I will say is that my attention this week has been divided between therapy and new commitments. 

I set an agenda for utilizing our system journal tomorrow (we’re in the chapter on improving communication with parts in the book) and I’m hoping to focus my energy on that. I want to set some ground rules for what we feel comfortable sharing in therapy as well as when we will share those things, and I need input from others to make those decisions. I also like the idea of writing a letter to my system explaining my intentions behind doing this work in therapy, and my commitment to helping us work together to function in a more cohesive and effective way. 

So yeah. We’re here, we’re safe, and we’re trying.

I hate this time of the week because my T levels bottom out and my mood plummets, but it is what it is and we’ll be okay.

I managed to check in with everyone in the journal this morning and the consensus seems to be that this is someone we haven’t dealt with before. I’m very hesitant to say much about this new part, except that they are young and that they were in distress. And we know our young parts very well and it clearly wasn’t any of them. It was frustrating in the moment because I had absolutely no idea what I could possibly do to to help them, whereas with A. or K. I generally do know what helps. The only thing I came up with was taking a fast acting PRN, but that felt inaccessible here in the group home as I would’ve had to interact with staff and I was really upset and not comfortable being that vulnerable with them. Just another reason why I need to get out of here. I think I’ve taken a PRN maybe five times in the year and a half I’ve been here, simply because if I am that upset, I probably don’t want to deal with (often rude) staff.

We generally name new parts quickly, so we’re thinking about doing that. I don’t have a clear idea of gender yet so I might choose something more neutral. It’s less about wanting to name them and more about needing a quick and easy way to refer to them. It’s basically a shortcut for the entire system and helps with both memory and internal communication. I guess it can be a bit fun too, though.  

I’m really relived and proud of myself for handling the whole situation well though. I was actually on facetime with a very close friend who knows about our DID when it happened, and I think that was ultimately helpful for us to have someone there. I also got an important phone call in the midst of all of this and managed to answer the call and politely but firmly explain that this was not a good time to talk, and was able to reschedule.