December 2009 Archives

It was a decade that began, for me as a survivor, with the public airing of the clergy abuse scandal in January 2002. I had thought that was all behind me. I had dealt with all of that a decade earlier, surviving some tortuous "healing" years in and out of the hospital in the early '90s.

By the mid '90s, I filed suit with the church, settled, and then completely distanced myself from therapy and the hospital. I wanted nothing to do with all of that. I was very clear that my DID (dissociative identity disorder) or multiple personality disorder was made up. While that was a huge piece of denial, and I know that now, somehow that allowed me the space to get married, buy a house, build up my career, and twice become a father. But, really, while many good things happened during those years, my life was severely partitioned. I just wasn't aware. Hurting myself would happen in its own box. Being petrified would happen in its own box. Everything went back to the way it was in the '80s, except I now had built a life for myself, which was very real but also somewhat of a facade, something I could hide behind.

It collapsed like a house of cards in 2002. It's shocking to me how quickly it all happened. The more functional parts of me thought they could handle things; the talking to reporters and details of my abuse being in the big daily papers. But something strange happened. I started to realize that my life really was a bunch of partitions or rooms and that things not only were not right in 2002, but they weren't right all along. I was kidding myself about how much I had healed. The depression, the switching, the suicidality, the eating; these all were back again.

After a series of false starts with various random therapists, I called my old therapist, I like to call him Freud, and asked if I could go back to see him. We started working together again. It was hard. I became increasingly symptomatic. I became more fragmented. I acted out in self-harm a lot. And I ended up in the hospital again. And again. And again. But it was different from the '90s and I can't quite put my finger on how. We worked hard. But it was slow progress.

Then things changed. In 2008 I started working with an art therapist. By late 2008, I stopped working with Freud as my main therapist and switched to the art therapist as my main therapist. And things took off, like I was shot out of a cannon. I was not used to working in this new way. The old way was to intellectualize everything. The new way was to explore feelings, draw and paint, hug each other when leaving, and use all those healing words and phrases. The new way acknowledged internal parts in a much more direct way. She wanted to know what they felt too. We started paying attention to everything. I started taking journaling very seriously and now use it to keep connected to my life, no matter how chaotic and confusing. Also, this website was born.

Here's what I accomplished in 2009 (in rough chronological order):

Whew! I've done a lot. And luckily I did a lot in this decade. So, when I refer to the "2000's", it will be known that there were many highs and many lows, but lots of healing, and it ended in a bang.

I do give up sometimes. I cannot deny that. In fact just a few hours before I wrote the "contract" a few weeks ago, I wrote to my therapist that I was giving up. But now, looking back, on this decade and a little bit on the decade before, I must know that I can never give up. Too much has been gained. I am a different person. I have healed in more ways than I could have ever imagined. And I look forward to the next decade, even though I know that there will be lots of hard work ahead of me. It will all be worth it!

Happy New Year to all of you!

In the hospital this month, during an "art therapy" group, we were asked to "draw a symbol for yourself". This is something I've done before. Often, the symbol is not one object, but a collection of many objects, and this particular drawing was no exception. Being in a particularly fragmented state, I drew on the left what I wanted my symbol to be (and what I knew it could be); a rather smooth whole with different colored parts. On the right, I drew where I actually was at the time. The colored parts were rough and jagged and the "core" of me felt very small and colorless.

I also noticed, quite to my surprise, that it has been several months since I've put up any art, aside from photography. It's definitely something I intend to do more of in the future. You may also be interested in Kate's new list of Creative Healing Blogs and Postings.

Note: I've replaced the original image posted here (which was a merge of two scans) with a photograph. I'm going to use that approach for images larger than letter size.

Related Posts:

• The Core and Flow (May 2009)
• Mental States (May 2009)
• Radiating Parts and Finding Balance (May 2009)
• 24 Hour Timeline (April 2009)
• Safety (April 2009)
• Introduction to Art Therapy (October 2008)

I know Christmas is a complicated time for many of us. For some, it's about getting through. For others, it's about enjoying the time. For most, it's a little bit of both. Whatever the case is for you, remember there is a "next week".

I know this song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishing and pretending for a little while can be okay. We know that our troubles will be with us. But for a time, perhaps, they can be to the side a bit.

Here are the lyrics:

It's interesting that the original version, written in the 40s, had very different lyrics which were dismissed by Judy Garland and ultimately changed. They are:

Use whichever version works for you!

I don't really have a good sense of what's happened over the past couple weeks. I am now out of the hospital. But events and experiences are all over the place in pieces. I suppose I could put the pieces together from my private journal entries, and I will do that in due course. I sometimes resist doing that because then it becomes patently clear how discrete and dramatic my experiences really are.

My main accomplishment in the hospital, and there seems to always be a main accomplishment for each admission in recent years, was the eventual "coming together" of all parts of me in order to create an honest and meaningful "System Contract". The Contract is ten pages long (in rather large font) and contains our first definitive statements on what the parameters must be for our system as well as truisms that we often have great difficulty acknowledging (and even deny).

As an oversimplification, the hospital is a place where my system can relax, resulting in a bit of coming unglued (hence the Brief Cohesion post), and then some learning takes place and I make some accomplishment or some meaning that moves me forward.

This is what happened with the Contract. It most certainly would not have been able to be written outside of the hospital. It was done so in four major sections over an intense period of several hours, with each containing a series of very clear and definitive statements. I will not share the whole Contract, but I will share just a few of these statements:

These are four of the 16 items from the first Section, consisting of the core elements. Subsequent sections were more wordy, very personal and specific.

It was signed by every part. When I was discharged late last week, I saw my therapist and I read the entire document out loud in her office. Doing this was probably one of the hardest things I have ever done; but all of me knew it had to be done. I didn't think I could get through certain sections. We cried. It felt as if a stake had been put in the ground and we were propelling ourselves forward.

Unfortunately, the Contract quickly lost its luster. I am quite disconnected from it now. It is a horrible feeling to know you have accomplished something historic, say it's your "mission statement", your "Constitution", your "Magna Carta", but then lose the experience and all the knowing in such a short time.

But this disconnection really does not diminish the magnitude of what I've been able to achieve. There really was a coming together of all my parts; more than the brief cohesion of the last post. It is not surprising that I would lose that complete sense of knowing. And I'm okay with that. I think we have to accept inside that things will still be very difficult and I will struggle.

Even if all that's a given, things are different now. The changes may not be as dramatic and quantifiable as I originally anticipated, but there has been a more qualitative reordering of sorts inside.

My time in the hospital has been marked, so far, by an unbelievable lack of internal cohesion and a nearly constant state of internal fragmentation. For the five plus days here, I have been all over the dissociative map, spending hours upon hours sitting out in front of the "safe" Nurses' Station, using my basic set of learned grounding skills along with the few other patients who also are at various states away from ground. I try not to judge too harshly my needing to do these basic grounding skills. I know the judgements do not solve anything. I use the iPhone games quite a bit, sticking to ones that are most helpful when dissociative: Peggle, Cross me Not, Cross Fingers, and MLB Baseball. I have listened to a little bit of classical music. I write. I draw. I talk. I don't sleep much. I try to participate in groups, but it has been really difficult for me this time.

There are some pressing issues here. The first is eating. I know eating is a form of control. I also know that it was hugely prominent back in the 90s and has been brewing for a while now. I am now at a 20 pound weight loss over the past couple months. And the hospital has exacerbated this issue. With DID, though, it's not uncommon to be in a part of yourself who has no trouble eating. But this often triggers parts of the system who do have these problems, makes them feel out of control, and the result is almost always more dissociation (and more trips to the Nurses' Station). Usually, I find that my best bet is to eat when I am able to maintain somewhat of a sense of core control, make negotiations, eat very small portions in a very deliberate manner, and all the while respect the difficulties that parts of me have.

Other parts have trouble with physical pain and it is severe enough to necessitate narcotic pain medications at times. The pain is always much worse in the hospital. It is always perceived as a complex of body memories. But maybe that is too easy an explanation. Medications are a bit tricky. There are two sides. I cannot rely on the medications as a first response, because they remove my first obligation to attempt to utilize the grounding skills (and may become a crutch). On the other hand, sometimes the grounding skills simply will not yield relief and at a certain point my doctor says, "There is no purpose in being a Marine when dealing with this". So the medication certainly can play a role; although my response to pain medications varies widely.

Yesterday, Monday, was almost totally lost time and this has been par for the course. My journal entry from 4:55PM reads:

In a short span, by 7PM, there was a sea change. I knew what this meant; that I was on the fast track to leaving the hospital. It is hard not to like me this way. I immediately developed a sense of humor, ironically made jokes about eating (there is a nurse who loves to talk about food), felt super strong and confident, and ultra-grounded. Usually I then quickly begin to get irritated about being here, and do nothing but advocate for leaving.

But I made an agreement when I first came in. It is documented in my private journal. I came in because I went into a functional state, denied parts, and kept pushing onward. I did not go into denial about parts consciously over the past few months. I did it for survival in order to achieve life tasks that needed to be done (e.g., work and home). To achieve this level of functionality, I sometimes have to do the equivalent of putting all the parts in a virtual "dungeon". In fact, often my perception is that parts cease to exist.

When I came in here, I said I cannot use the same tactics I generally use in the hospital, where I get recharged some, reconstitute myself, and leave. I know I will end up going back to the same life-threatening safety issues that are front and center in my life right now. The part of me who is focused on the serious self-harming needs to be addressed and the work needs to start in the hospital. This kind of work with similar acting out parts in the past all began in the hospital. I understand this part needs to be communicated with if I am to achieve any sense of real safety and stability at home.

So, I quickly became determined not to let this new "awakening" get in the way of what I knew I must do. The "awakening", though, felt amazingly good, but it was not long before everything started shifting yet again. By 8PM, I started to act out the normal script; I have been in the hospital too many times to not see it. Oh, there was a temptation to keep telling staff "Things are fine, I feel great, I'm okay." I started to do some of that. But this is not a game, and this is life and death serious. I was up front with them. When I tell that them that I know there is more to what is going on right in the moment, they get it. When I tell that that my safety has been off-scale jeopardized and life-threatening, they get it. When I tell them that I do not have any evidence at all that the motivations of this dangerous part have changed one bit, they get it. The nurse said (paraphrasing): "Not to worry; we will not let you go until the big safety issue is addressed head on."

At 10:28PM, the steps I had taken had again changed things inside. The cohesion started lessening and I wrote in my private journal:

At 10:40PM, I wrote:

Tonight, I slept for a mere 1.5 hours and was not phased by the second round of sleep medications. I do not know where all this will take me. Doctors, nurses, and friends are basically telling me to "keep working and see what happens". I am working super hard. I am being given time and space. For that I am grateful and determined.

You may be interested in these related posts:

• Mental States (May 2009; visually represents different mental states)
• Awakenings: An Extreme Example (September 2009; discusses an experience similar to the "awakening" discussed above)
• Making Sense of Nonsense (December 2009; talks about what led to the place I'm at now)

 Printable PDF

Perhaps the most famous puzzle in probability
      is the Monty Hall problem.
It's based on the old game show called
      "Let's Make a Deal".

You are given the choice of three doors.
Behind one door is a big prize.
Behind the other doors are goats.

You choose a door.
The door stays closed.
Monty Hall, the game show host,
      knows what's behind all of the doors.
He opens one of the two remaining doors,
      always showing you a goat.

Then he asks:
Do you want to stick with your first choice
      or switch to the last remaining door?

What do you do?
Most people think that your odds of winning are
      always one-third no matter what you do.
But this is not true.

Probability theory shows that if you switch,
      your odds of winning actually double.
Instead of your odds being one-third if you stay,
      they are two-thirds if you switch.

Dissociation is a lot like this problem,
      except the rules of probability don't apply.

My life is quite chaotic right now and a little bit out of control. By the way, I do know how to minimize!

As a system, "I" am cognizant of the fact that there is an extremely delicate balance between all the facets of my life. We cannot be too much in any one area for any protracted period of time. We all know that inside even though many of us will deny it if asked outright. This balance is crucial for my internal life as well as external life. On Thursday, hopefully, I'll write more about this from a neuroscience perspective. But now I'll focus on what my experiences have been lately.

Balance is what all of us strive for, whether dissociative or not. But there are extra challenges for those of us who dissociate, and as a general rule, the more dissociative we are, the more difficulty we have finding that balance. While there is certainly a concept of a dissociative continuum, and normal dissociation for "normal people", there is without question a different scale for some of us.

Another way of looking at the problem from an astronomical analogy is that most people stay within the context of their own psychological solar system. For the dissociative, we can be in the solar system, in the galaxy, in the Universe, in some parallel Universe, in a singularity point, or in any combination of the above, at any timescale.

For me, lately, I am experiencing more of the extremes of dissociation, where it's difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between reality and fantasy, between present and past, between safety and danger, and even to know who I am and what "me" means.

Yesterday, I was not that in touch and already somewhat unstable inside. Yet, I was able to shift things to be what I needed to be. I volunteered at my daughter's school, helped my wife fix her computer at work, got some work chores done, cleaned the bathrooms, told my daughter an awesome story about fairies, and more. But there was something missing. I was able to be functional in all those ways at the expense of loss of control. I have been oscillating between extremes and this is not sustainable.

Not only have I been functional over the past week (or longer), I have had some really amazing experiences. I was in the "zone" for a newspaper photography shoot of a parade. I freed myself from the usual "thinking" associated with playing piano and created some wonderful recordings. I was able to teach my daughter, who is somewhat new to the violin, how to improvise, create and feel music. This was an "Aha!" moment for her and it was so gratifying for me. These are examples of how dissociation can be a very wonderful gift and "healthy".

But there has been too much else going on and too many external and internal triggers. I know that parts have freaked out at night and sought out my wife (minutes or hours after some of these great experiences). I nearly lost my daughter at a hockey game (also minutes after a great experience). And I was unable to keep myself safe today. Plus, I am having an onslaught of memories and nightmares I cannot even remember.

This is not unknown territory for me. I've been struggling with a dissociative disorder for a long time, and have been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID) since back in the early 90s. Many of the feelings and experiences now are quite similar to back then. But what makes the present different is that I try as best I can to pay attention to what's going on and document everything I can. That effort is usually what makes the difference and keeps me safe.

Right now, that effort to document is keeping me out of the hospital and allowing me to "make sense of nonsense" or at least document the nonsense. I have kept a private electronic journal for the past 16 months, and I write at an average clip of 30,000 words a month. I'm usually around a computer and can write to it whenever I need to. As a bit of an aside, about a month ago, I wrote a handy little script for my iPhone that allows me to be virtually anywhere and write to the journal (as long as I have a 3G or Edge ssh connection). As I've written before, I use the journal (as well as this blog) to help me track of my crazy life and learn from the range of experiences I have. It's certainly not a linear healing process, but it absolutely does help.

One post to my journal stands out. At 3:43PM yesterday I wrote: "I also think something very bad happened inside just a little while ago. But I don't seem to know about it now. It was purely an inside thing." This, I think, had nothing at all to do with planning to be hurt or anything like that. It was just a knowing that something happened inside and I documented it as soon as possible. I cannot explain it. If I didn't take such care to document, these awarenesses would probably be lost in the noise.

But, despite the documentation, I still have been unable to guarantee my safety. And I am not stable internally to the degree I need to be. I believe some of the functional stuff and good experiences and successes threw me off a bit. I kept using those as signs of hope that things would change. I really cannot assess the chances of things changing and becoming more stable if I keep going without some sort of intervention.

The reason why I am on the fence about going into the hospital is because of those successes and good experiences. The hospital removes that. The other times I have been to the hospital, as far as I can remember, were because of complete loss of functionality. That has not happened now. I am wondering if I can build in safety more explicitly and tell my wife and boss that I need to be home for the time being. My wife already knows that I have not been well. She can tell. She has told me she knows this. She doesn't know how to act about the eating, whether to be happy or upset about my weight loss. She doesn't know how to react to parts flipping out at night and then me being completely functional and on the ball in the morning. I acted incredulous with her about it, because when she brought it up that she knows I've been having a hard time, I was in a completely different state.

I want to see how this explicit safety plan goes. If I cannot make it work, and home falls apart and everything breaks down, then I will know I need to be in the hospital. I am not there yet though. For now, I will push ahead, keep documenting, and trying to make sense of the "nonsense" and hope that I take a trip back to our solar system and stay there for a while.

I have written about many of these issues in the past. One advantage to the blog is that it distills a lot of the things I write about in my private journal. It's important for me to know what happens moment to moment, day to day. But it's equally important to know how those experiences fit into the larger picture. The blog serves that purpose. So, while I am glad that people read the blog, it truly is more for me than for anyone else. My apologies for being so selfish!

If you find this post interesting, you may want to take a look at some related posts from the past several months:

• Does Dissociation Make Us Special? (June 2009)
• From Chaos to Control (June 2009)
• Moving Past the "Band-Aid" Approach (July 2009)
• Acceptance (August 2009)
• My Take on What Healing Means (September 2009)
• Giving Up Rant (September 2009)
• The Boat is Sinking or Is There Even a Boat? (October 2009)

If you have not done so already, please see the video post The Burden.

Feel free to add your own commentary to the comments here. I've closed comments on the original post. And, as always, differing opinions and viewpoints are very much welcomed!

My initial reaction was "Wow! I get it!" and instant identification and extreme sadness.

But my next reaction was wondering what the impact might be on people who have not been abused at all. I wondered if only those of us who were abused and damaged in this way would actually "get it". Then I wondered what the person who has been not severely hurt, but had been abused, would think about this. Would they look at this and say "Hey, you're going way to far with this! I was not affected this way and I was abused!"

The goal, obviously, of the advertising is not to reach people like us who are survivors of abuse, were affected in ways depicted in the piece, and who are healing. But if it speaks only to us, then the advertising would most certainly be deemed a failure. Since I cannot see this from any other perspective but my own, I cannot judge its impact on others. Obviously the problem of child sexual abuse is a societal one and awareness needs to be raised in all areas of society for there to be any drastic changes.

To be honest, I don't really worry too much about any of that. I'm concerned, first and foremost, for myself. Because, for me, this piece hits me to the core. Most of us have seen the short film "INSiDE" which focuses on present day impact of abuse through dissociation, specifically dissociative identity disorder. I have seen many movies where kids were abused or hurting or neglected. I can't remember any having such a direct impact on me personally. And I appreciate the fact that "The Burden" makes its point in approximately one minute. I have a short attention span!

What I think the piece does very well, though, is it portrays the fact that there is an outside reality and an inner reality (or "inner child" if you will). I like also that it shows no abuse images whatsoever. This portrays only the child's reality as a child. There's a part that the outside sees, which can be quite normal. And a part that is the inner world of the child, which likely nobody sees. I understand that the long-term effects aren't part of the piece, but then I fear the power would be lessened because it would try to do too many things. I could imagine, actually, a series of follow-up commercials showing each of the long-term impacts of abuse felt in the present which consist of, perhaps, an adult with the child alongside him/her. The commercials could all keep the same theme, perhaps even the same music, but as a campaign, it could make a significant impact. My reference is the Get a Mac ads.

The challenge for me, as someone who struggles mightily with dissociative identity disorder (DID), is to understand the younger parts inside and help them heal. I don't understand them well. I never have. I don't really experience what they experience. So, I rarely get that upset by their plight. This video is a wake up call to me. Not only did it help me to "get it", but it helps me be more committed to helping them.

I do have trouble with the piece saying a part of the child "dies". On one level I can appreciate that statement. On another level, I have a difficult time acknowledging that in myself. Death is a very tricky subject for DID survivors. We tend to think of it differently from others, for a variety of reasons. The impact of severe abuse, though, is not so much parts of us dying, but parts of us being damaged or forever altered. That's the burden! On the other hand, the very heart of DID is the concept of distinct parts of a personality. From my experience, many of those parts remain hidden, sometimes locked away. I would never say that any are "dead". But in many ways they are so hidden away that an objective observer might say they are very close to being "effectively" dead.

Overall, "The Burden" makes me want to reach out to those children inside myself. It's led to a renewal of my determination to heal all of me. And gives me a new perspective on what "all of me" really means. So, the piece helped at least one person. Maybe that's enough to call it a smashing success.

"The Burden" was directed by Nico & Martin and created by advertising group McCann Erickson for a commercial in Italy to raise awareness of child sexual abuse. The version that is on YouTube and readily available online has a rather uninspiring soundtrack. The version I am posting here is on the Casa do Menor site and features a partial recording of the Current 93 song "Soft Black Stars" covered by Antony and the Johnsons. I will record my own cover of this song on piano and publish it over the next couple days as a follow-up to this post.

The end text says: "Bimbi abusati. Una parte di sé che muore per sempre." Translated, this says: "Abused children. A part of him who dies forever." In the English version of the video the closing text says: "Sexual abuse can be a heavy burden for a child." Obviously, those are two very different messages. Both are accurate.

You may also be interested in the lyrics for "Soft Black Stars":

This is the first video I have embedded on this site. I sometimes provide links, but I may do more of this in the future for videos that have significant meaning to me and that I wish to share with others.

Please visit Casa do Menor. A translation of the site explains that it was established in 1986 and consists of schools and homes for abused and street children. It was founded by a Father Renato Chiera; which gives me hope about what a good priest can do for the benefit of society.

Related post: My Commentary on "The Burden"