DID, CPTSD & Trauma Recovery

I have DID, CPTSD, and an autoimmune disease. This is mostly a personal blog about those things, with some off-topic reblogging.

This blog is mainly written by the core trio of my dissociative parts: Mae, Jude, and Hannah. We rarely tag our posts with our names. Older posts are tagged. Our habits have changed.

I'm an adult. The intended audience of my blog is other adults.

I experience my DID as a disorder. I view my system as parts of one whole person with a dissociated sense of self. I am working towards integration. The way I discuss my experiences may make you uncomfortable.

I'm not going to make a list of every kind of hate, evil, and exclusion I don't tolerate.  I don't think doing that would stop those people from following me anyway. When I notice hateful people in my notes, I block them.

I think I'm really feeling anxious because of the language one of the two leaders keeps using when she talks about getting people out of their comfort zones. It seems like people often use the excuse of "I'm getting you out of your comfort zone" as an excuse to push past my boundaries and ignore my needs.

Like when I set a hard limit and say "I am not able to do that because of my disability" what they hear is that I just lack confidence and need more encouragement.

I do think that there is merit to stretching, growth, and moving past your "comfort zone" but it's just the way this person is talking about it that is making me uneasy.

I hope that I am wrong, or that if I am right then this is an opportunity for me to be strong and to be an advocate for myself and to model healthy boundaries.

Since it's the end of the month now, I'm looking at it and I'm trying to figure out how I simultaneously held things together and also lost so much time.

Things really went off the rails around Mother's day, which is understandable. I remember I was in horrible physical pain that weekend, like so bad I was on the ground sobbing. That was Saturday. Then Sunday I went to church and cried through the whole service and wound up having to take meds for a panic attack (something I haven't had to do in ages).

It's a whole CPTSD thing, not from Mother's day or the usual mom-trauma - it's that I have other trauma that happens to have happened around that same time of year. I completely forgot (repressed?) it this year, but my body did not.

Then I had an infusion on the following Monday and apparently I was already sick when I got that infusion, but I was in complete denial about that. It was only a week later when my partner caught my "allergies" and came down with the same symptoms that I finally listened to her and admitted that maybe I had been sick. I'm so fucking lucky that I didn't get seriously ill from getting an infusion while already sick.

I think everything from Mother's day onward is kind of just... survival mode. I remember enough. I managed to get enough done to keep myself afloat. But I don't think I was fully present in my life.

The dream was about going home for a visit and the feeling that it was "too late".

I was visiting my parents' home, or a fictional version of it anyway. it had more stories than it did in real life, and more rooms. My mom was sick, but she hadn't told me that over the phone so I arrived to find that she was sick and the house was in chaos.

Part of the plot of the dream was that my mom believed I was coming home to stay permanently -- something about getting another degree at the university there. I guess I'd decided to go back to school? But then there had been a change of plans and I had to tell her that I wasn't coming home.

Most of the dream was about me trying to clean the house, put things in order and take care of pets that had been neglected. I was working my way through the house, room by room. Eventually I got down to a basement level where I found multiple rooms that my mom obviously intended to be mine. They were filthy, like the rest of the house, but every wall was covered with a half-finished mural of all the things that I had loved when I was very young, like 1980s cartoons. It was this enormous project of dedication and love, hidden under layers of dysfunction and decay. And there was this bitter sweetness about it too, because the rooms my mom was decorating were for her little girl, not for an adult woman. She intended to welcome home a child, not the adult I had become.

The guy who was talking about going to Disneyland said something about how it is so much nicer here than where he used to live, which now has summers up to 120 degrees. I said, "Where is that?" He gave a general area and I said, "Oh, me too!" and then he asked for the specific town and I told him and he said, "Oh, me too!"

First of all, summers were not 120 degrees when I left there less than 15 years ago. Climate change is wild!

Secondly, I hope it was really validating for him when I said, "Congratulations on getting out."

He turned to his coworker and said, "See, I told you I wasn't exaggerating!"

About a month ago I went to a meeting about a volunteer event that I'll be going to later this summer. It was just the first of several meetings so that we could all meet each other and cover some basic questions, but I absolutely expected to be told that our next step would be to get background checks done because this event involves working with kids.

Every time I've volunteered with kids in the past, I've had a background check done. I've even been fingerprinted for one organization.

So when the background check wasn't brought up, I started to fear that it was because this volunteer event is through my church. I worried that this was a religious exemption, which made me feel really gross. It also made me worry about how many churches are using an exemption like this to avoid properly vetting their volunteers.

I brought this up in therapy and my therapist joined me in being really distressed and disgusted about this. We talked about bringing it up with the volunteer organizer and my pastor and we also talked about how to cope with my hypervigilance - the feeling that I was going to need to be personally responsible for protecting every single child there from every adult there. (Not reasonable or realistic, but it's what I have been feeling.)

Our next meeting for the event is coming up, so I've been gearing myself up for that conversation. Then today, an unexpected email landed in my inbox.

It was a link to submit my information for a background check.

They just forgot to tell us that a background check was required to volunteer. Because of course it is!

Even if there is a religious exemption, this church wouldn't take it. That isn't how they operate. They don't do the right thing because it's the law, they do the right thing because it's the right thing.

I don't know if it's because I recognized that I was triggered and just recognizing the trigger helped me pull out of it a bit, or if it's other life stuff.

This advice is for everyone, but it is especially true for women.

Do not go on a hike on a first date.

Even if you meet the person in a public place first and they seem okay, do not leave that public place and go on a hike with them.