"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Not today Justin
Product Placement
RMH
pixel skylines
cherry valley forever
Jules of Nature
$LAYYYTER
styofa doing anything
art blog(derogatory)
ojovivo
blake kathryn
@theartofmadeline
Xuebing Du
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Acquired Stardust
Game of Thrones Daily
occasionally subtle
seen from Finland
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Argentina
seen from Singapore
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Sweden
seen from Morocco
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from Spain
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United States
@kbo-system
If this festive season triggers bad memories or emotions, know you’re not alone and it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault you’ve had bad things happen and it’s not your fault you’re mentally ill. I know there’s a lot of pressure to be happy around Christmas, so try to take it easy❤️
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I’m about to save you thousands of dollars in therapy by teaching you what I learned paying thousands of dollars for therapy:
It may sound woo woo but it’s an important skill capitalism and hyper individualism have robbed us of as human beings.
Learn to process your emotions. It will improve your mental health and quality of life. Emotions serve a biological purpose, they aren’t just things that happen for no reason.
1. Pause and notice you’re having a big feeling or reaching for a distraction to maybe avoid a feeling. Notice what triggered the feeling or need for a distraction without judgement. Just note that it’s there. Don’t label it as good or bad.
2. Find it in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Does it feel like a weight everywhere? Does it feel like you’re vibrating? Does it feel like you’re numb all over?
3. Name the feeling. Look up an emotion chart if you need to. Find the feeling that resonates the most with what you’re feeling. Is it disappointment? Heartbreak? Anxiety? Anger? Humiliation?
4. Validate the feeling. Sometimes feelings misfire or are disproportionately big, but they’re still valid. You don’t have to justify what you’re feeling, it’s just valid. Tell yourself “yeah it makes sense that you feel that right now.” Or something as simple as “I hear you.” For example: If I get really big feelings of humiliation when I lose at a game of chess, the feeling may not be necessary, but it is valid and makes sense if I grew up with parents who berated me every time I did something wrong. So I could say “Yeah I understand why we are feeling that way given how we were treated growing up. That’s valid.”
5. Do something with your body that’s not a mental distraction from the feeling. Something where you can still think. Go on a walk. Do something with your hands like art or crochet or baking. Journal. Clean a room. Figure out what works best for you.
6. Repeat, it takes practice but is a skill you can learn :)
I have been in EMDR therapy recently to help with past trauma and like 90% of the appointments is just this post. Which I thought was silly at first bcs I was like "well I know how I'm feeling, I feel bad" but man you have no idea. Literally JUST talking through whatever stressful thing I have going on at the moment and whenever I feel a Big Emotion stopping and acknowledging, naming, and sitting with it. I've made more progress with my trauma and mental illnesses just doing this in a single year than I have in like 10+ years of therapy.
It might feel silly or pointless at first but stick with it, it really helps.
As someone with alexithymia, I have found DBT's handouts on "Understanding and Naming Emotions" really helpful in being able to tell what emotion I was having to then validate it or manage it. They are detailed. On each emotion page, Marsha Linehan (long may she live) put things under the following headings, to create a detailed emotion profile:
[Emotion] words - synonyms for and variations of the main emotion e.g. under anger is fury, outrage, resentment, bitterness, annoyance, frustration, hostility, etc
Prompting events for feeling [emotion] - so for anger some prompting events could be "having an important goal blocked," "you or someone you care about being threatened or attacked," etc
Interpretations of events that prompt feelings of [emotion] - similar to above, but it is thought patterns or beliefs that could prompt having a feeling - an example for anger is "ruminating about the situation that caused the anger in the first place"
Biological changes and experiences of [emotion] - so for anger, bodily experiences like fast breathing, a tightness in your chest, tensed muscles, being unable to stop crying - and urges you might get, like wanting to hurt someone
Expressions and actions of [emotion] - just what it sounds like. For anger some examples are: walking heavily, stomping, slamming things; brooding or withdrawing from others; mean expression; physically or verbally attacking someone; crying; grinning
Aftereffects of [emotion] - what happens after the first intense wave of emotion finishes. For anger it includes: narrowing of attention, ruminating about past and imagined future situations that could make you angry, depersonalisation and dissociative experiences
I tend to slowly scan each part of my body for physical sensations, body language, and urges (ie "biological changes and experiences") and then try to match those to an emotion, now that I have those cheat sheets. Getting good at this took a lot of practice and repetition. For me at least, it is a manual skill I have had to build up.
Working backwards to figure out what emotions you might logically have in response to an event and seeing if those match what you are feeling can be really helpful too.
You can find these DBT emotion handouts here (scroll to page 7 for the start of the emotion profiles):
And here is every single DBT handout from the official manual for anyone interested (don't sue me pls):
Also helpful to other people I have talked to is this emotion-sensation wheel by Lindsay Brahman, which some people find easier to follow:
Just don't do a me - I took this too literally at first and thought that only the sensations directly branching off the emotions made up those emotions. In reality there is a lot of mixing and matching, and a lot of stuff not covered on the wheel. It is a rough (but often useful!) guide.
And here is another useful infographic that comes from this article by Greatist, which they adapted from a 2014 study that aimed to map bodily sensations of emotions. Yellow areas are the most activated/tense regions (so they might feel hot, tight, tense, full of energy, warm, maybe sick or fluttery if it is your stomach), and blue areas are the least activated regions (feel heavy, hard to move, maybe weak or cold)
And finally a tip for my neurodivergent friends: when you are scanning your body for emotions, look for signs or causes of overstimulation first, and address that before you try to do any of this - headphones, leaving a space, eating or drinking, turning off lights, weighted blankets, going somewhere cooler or warmer, stimming, whatever you need/can reasonably do. In its early stages overstimulation may feel like an intense emotion, and unfortunately mixing them up can lead to some bad and unproductive times.
I think I should legally be allowed to kill when I front.
(You’ve chosen to not remember this part.)
separation between alters only "feels like healing" because you're actively making dissociative barriers worse. it feels better because you're separating yourself from your trauma and emotions, even if you think you're facing them head-on through your alters. if you numb your whole arm you can't feel the papercut, can you?
the shitty painful stage in recovery of learning and accepting your trauma is not fun but is vital to heal. dissociation is a coping mechanism, of course youre gonna feel good when you dissociate all of your negative memories away and reinforce alter barriers, thats how you felt good while being traumatized as a child. but like OP said, it is not healthy just because it feels good.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
It’s actually crazy to me how people forget DID is not a ‘plural’ disorder. It is a trauma disorder before anything else. No one is medicalizing ‘being plural’ the fact of the matter is that the way people with DID/OSSD/DDNOS experience their system is because of trauma.
To even slightly indicate the *real* reason we aren’t making steps in our healing is cause we ‘refuse to accept that being plural is a nondisorder’ is just overtly insulting and it’s shocking that I’ve seen people make these statements. If you don’t want to align yourself with DID and the other dissociative disorders I cannot stop you but do not tell others who choose to align themselves with it that the way they exist is because they refuse to *accept* being plural. It is because we have been through trauma that made us think we were going to die.
Have a little respect.
If you have other disorders/disabilities do they affect alters differently?
Yes
No
do you have DID/OSDD?
yes, i have been diagnosed with DID
yes, i have been diagnosed with OSDD
yes, i have been diagnosed with both
yes, i have self diagnosed with DID
yes, i have self diagnosed with OSDD
yes, i have self diagnosed with both
no, but i have a suspicion that i might have one or both of these
no, i don't have DID or OSDD
i was diagnosed when it was still MPD
i don't know what that is
other/nuance/bald
do you have DID (dissociative identity disorder) or OSDD (other specified dissociative disorder)?
yes, i have been diagnosed with DID
yes, i have been diagnosed with OSDD
yes, i have been diagnosed with both
yes, i have self diagnosed with DID
yes, i have self diagnosed with OSDD
yes, i have self diagnosed with both
no, but i have a suspicion that i might have one or both of these
no, i don't have DID or OSDD
i was diagnosed when it was still called MPD (multiple personality disorder)
i don't know what that is
other/nuanced answer
You are not a bad person for having used escapism as a coping mechanism when you were younger. You are not at fault for why you did. You did what you needed to in order to survive. It is not your fault you ended up developing it as an unhealthy coping mechanism. You were a child who needed to survive and cope.
shoutout to the systems with alters who are nothing more than their roles. shoutout to the alters who people never meet, never see, because they fulfill their role and leave. shoutout to the alters who can't feel any emotions other than emotions associated with their roles. shoutout to the alters who can't perform any tasks or actions outside of their role. shoutout to alters who recognize how little substance they have and are content and fine with it. shoutout to alters who don't even recognize themselves as part of a system because all they do is fulfill their roles. you do not have to be a fleshed out, fully conscious being to be real and matter.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
you know what fucking sucks about being the Guy whose there for all the intense shitty emotions? i cant fucking escape it!! i want to just stop feeling this and skip to the part where i feel better but i cant!!! feeling like shit and wanting to die is my job, any time im Me i experience nothing but misery. why is it my job to want to die? how is that fair? why am i not allowed to feel better?
me: im just faking all of this
the child part that was sobbing through an intense flashback earlier today:
When ppl talk about alters being stuck in trauma time, they usually talk about those alters not knowing the body's friends, or recognizing where they live, or any number of physical reality changes. And we've definitely had that experience! But more often what "alters being stuck in trauma time" means for us is those alters know basic physical reality facts, but their emotional reality has not changed at all. So they might know our best friend, but they aren't connected to how that friend and I interact. They respond to everything like the trauma is still happening, so they expect any mistake to be met with punishment, they expect the ppl around them to suddenly hurt them without warning, they have no ability to use our modern coping methods, and they have no concept of anything being other than the abusive environment of our youth.
So yeah, our trauma-stuck alters typically know we live in a different house and our dad isn't coming home, and they know things like we graduated college and the names of our friends. What we struggle with a lot more is getting them to understand that this current time isn't just our childhood with new set dressings.
love will always turn me back into that little girl who was never good enough a little girl just begging someone to love her, take care of her, to hold her and never let go
do any of alters have an accent that isn't typical for where you live/grew up?
yes, one does.
yes, multiple do!
unsure/maybe/slightly?
nope!
other (explain in tags)
[not a traumagenic system/see-results button]
- amaranth.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Idk maybe that's why
"I would notice if you switched!"
No. You wouldn't notice a person with DID switch unless you payed very close attention. DID is made to be covert, showing obvious and visible signs of switching can be dangerous for the system. Most alters/parts learn to mask and blend in to make it less obvious. Parts with very different personalities and mannerisms try their best to learn how act as the host for the systems safety.
- unknown
