Alterhuman experiences in therapy & lessons to take with me (TW: mental illness, SA, sexual trauma/shame, themes of intimacy)

Being an alterhuman has played a big part in my therapy journey as of late, and my therapist uses it to drive home my lessons and homework.

“The wolf side of you makes you confident. Focus on that so it drowns out the shame your human side experiences.”

Thank you anon, that is so kind of you. <3 It's been harder to write therapy updates of late because things have felt...more wordless? Difficult to capture and summarize. And then on top of that, since I've been dealing with atlantoaxial instability (AAI), looking at a screen and putting together words has been immensely more challenging lol. Thankfully, I'm starting to feel a lot better in that regard and my C2 hasn't subluxed in six days! (It was subluxing every day at least once a day for a hot second there, so this is feeling great.) All that to say, I've missed sharing therapy updates too and I really appreciate the space and the nudge. :)

Things are going well with E, overall! The work we've done together over my 12 weeks of medical leave (ending tomorrow T_T) was not really what I expected and planned/hoped for during my leave, but in the end perhaps it's been what we've needed? Things were super chaotic for a while there, between this huge rupture we had in April that had E questioning if she was the right therapist for us, and the unalive attempt in May and all the safety planning, concerns, negotiations, etc. that had to take place around that. And then since then, a lot of our sessions have been impacted by our subsequent AAI and significant neck pain...shockingly (lol), it's hard to do deep work when it feels like your head is falling off and your neck muscles are in crazy painful spasm trying to hold it on.

But through all this, we've had some major breakthroughs along the way...things like being able to better hold onto E between sessions, feeling more grounded in her unchanging care for us, learning what it means to prioritize our safety and wellbeing (and unlearning how cavalier we've been about those things), and making some big strides forward in helping insiders stuck in the past and old programming be able to recognize that we're in the "after time" now, free from our abusers.

For the last one, what has been most helpful lately is tying the "present" to something that helps parts concretely understand the concept of before and after. We're using the shark tattoo on our left forearm to be the touchstone for that...the "before time" was when we didn't have the shark tattoo, and the "after time" is now, when we do have the shark tattoo. Parts remember our arm being blank and sharkless, so it's been helpful to have this visual reminder of the changing times. We've been able to say things like, "mom and dad have never seen this tattoo, we haven't been around them since getting it, if the tattoo is here on our arm it means we're not seeing them anymore." We're using our new car as a similar tangible indicator of freedom in the present.

All of that orienting stuff has been the gateway to helping our system step into the belief that we're allowed to have a life apart from mom...that we're allowed to exist without her, that we're allowed to exist at all. Because we already have been doing those things. We're already existing. We're already living. We're living the good life we created for ourselves. We've been doing that sans mom for months and months now...and we're still here, still living. But so many parts had no concept of time and no idea that we've been existing and living since separating from mom. The anchor or our tattoo has helped us make that more understandable.

We also had to do a lot of creative work internally around internal communication, since we discovered that there's a distorter/scrambler machine thingy inside that blocks fronting parts from being able to communicate with programmed insiders. Sometimes it just blocks it and sometimes it literally changes or distorts what we're trying to communicate. So we've been working around that, exploring creative changes, like instead of it changing the message, can it just change our inside voice to sound like we've sucked helium? That's still distorting it! But in a silly and still understandable way.

it's totally normal to view most of your interactions with other people similarly to how villager interactions in Minecraft work (I give you something and you give me something, transactional relationships)!

this is mostly for my fellow cluster B's who struggle with feeling like everyone around them is an NPC and that their interactions are incredibly superficial

Anyway, I spent most of therapy talking about her and how my relationship with my partner has actually decreased my phobia of her. Telling my partner about "Delilah" and having her respond with "she sounds like a little me" just shifted my entire perspective.

My therapist was so respectful in trying to create a place that felt safer for this part. She didn't even use the word "safe space" because she recognized how insulting that felt to a part who feels like the entire world is unsafe.

But we got to a place where I could meet her there in that place and offer her some reassurance. But she still feels like a ghost to me and I think I still look like a monster to her. Strangely, I found two teenager parts I know very well were able to enter her space freely, and they behave like they know her well, like they've always known her. I'm smothering down the urge to react with "Well you could have told me!"

The other surprise was the reaction to my therapist asking if she needed anything. This part feels so small and passive and weak to me. But immediately the answer was an image, not words, and image of weapons - blunt instruments to fend other people off. I felt so unsure that I asked my therapists permission. No one has ever asked for weapons in their safe space before. Well, Rory asked for a bat, but that felt different. My therapist said of course, she needs to defend herself, but I can't imagine her wielding this weapons. I don't think she could even lift them.

My therapist: Okay, but the ways you were feeling sound completely normal and reasonable to me given the circumstances.

Me:

imagine the sun.

This is a very reductive view since it's only in one specific wavelength, but it will serve to get the idea.

The sun isn't solid. It's a giant ball of plasma. It doesn't have a smooth surface. Oh, and it's spinning.

If something isn't solid and it's spinning, then not all parts of it have to spin at the same speed. We're used to that, we've all stirred stuff or seen clouds and felt wind before. (or at least one of those, I guess.) So, that plasma that is our sun spins faster at the poles than at the equator. that is also a somewhat reductive view, but it gets the point across as well so, whatever.

Plasma is not like other forms of matter. plasma is what you get when a gas is so energized that the electrons become more of a communal medium than any kind of one-hydrogen-nucleus-one-electron nonsense. It's basically electron broth, proton soup.

so the sun's electromagnetic field is a bit of a tangled mess. Earth's field is, broadly speaking, a big ol bar magnet with a few bits of localized fuckery. The sun's electromagnetic field is like.

kinda.

these tangled field lines are places where plasma creeps up and out, drawn along the field to make tangled loops in the sun's corona. the bright spots in this wavelength are sunspot regions. sunspots form in pairs at either end of those tangled field lines. sometimes these tangles get SO tangled that they bend and snap and erupt and the sun belches out a big ol burst of plasma all at once.

I have been in trauma therapy to unravel a lot of very old stuff. Some of it is from a traumatizing childhood experience (or at least, it's centered on that) and some of it is because I was an undiagnosed adhd autistic kid and some of it is because I've known I wasn't cis/het since I was about thirteen and sussed out that I'm genderqueer when I was about seventeen and also I live in the southern US.

Sometimes, that therapy looks like my therapist checking in, noticing I'm mostly stable enough, and we can carefully pull on one of the threads of underlying trauma to sort of map out some of the connections in my brain to release some of the pent up energy in those connections. (More or less. As I understand it.) Bit like detangling the field lines from one of the calmer regions of the sun.

Sometimes, though, there's a really big obvious angry snarl where something else has already yanked one of those threads loose. Then it feels a little bit more like we're trying to detangle one of those sunspot regions before it blehs plasma all over everything.

today was a bit like my therapist looked at me, had an internal "okay, there's what we're doing today" cause there was a big ol sunspot region right front and center.