Recently in Dissociation Category

There has been a push from inside over the past couple years to do more "meaningful photography." What I mean by "meaningful" is work that speaks to my own experiences more fully. Put another way, I want to do photography that is psychologically aware.

I got interested in photography around the time my kids were born; that was more than a decade ago. And since the kids were the focus for so many years, photography had been mostly about happiness and documenting happiness.

It didn't take me long to realize that photography was about seeing and not just looking. For someone who had lived a life based on dissociation, this was a real breakthrough and insight for me; a small first step in healing and becoming aware.

I have developed what was a small hobby into something a bit larger. I do some portrait work professionally, but my main interest has been photojournalism and sports which I shoot for local news outlets. Portrait work is intensely personal and requires a huge amount of "presence," engagement with the subjects, and directing. Sometimes I am simply not able to do that, which poses a problem if people have made appointments with me. So, I tend to minimize those kinds of assignments now. I sometimes become scared and forget all my skills and the images come out quite lousy, at least by my standards. It's too unpredictable, because sometimes I can be perfectly "on" and sometimes I can be "not at all there."

Photojournalism, in contrast, is a style of photography that is more detached and a bit less personal, but one could argue has a larger payoff because the images look spontaneous. The idea behind a photojournalism style of photography is that you become an impartial observer and document the details of the event. Mostly, the goal is to document all the scales of detail that you "see", from those that most everyone would recognize as the describing the event to those small elements that nobody really pays any attention to (e.g., the little kids poking their heads out from under the Bride and Groom's head table). It is really the only way to shoot live sports or any event where there are people going about their business.

Photojournalism is a microcosm of what healing from dissociation is all about. To see an event photographically, you must be prepared to do it from an "all of you" perspective. From this whole perspective, you can capture not only the range of length scales (from macro to micro) but also the range of human emotions. Sports is one great example, because there is always "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." Another is a wedding. And a third is any news event.

The photograph above was taken at a local elementary school's art show. I took many real-life people pictures at this event. But as I was looking at some of the art on display done by children, I stumbled upon this scene. In a self-portrait of a boy, I saw the reflection of other framed artwork several feet away. There were rows of art on display, and if I had to do this over again, I would have swapped out the reflected images that weren't self-portraits with ones that were. One of the tricks of photojournalism is that if you can unobtrusively change the scene, you assume you have the authority to do so, granted to you by your press badge, and just do it.

The obvious composition of this image would have been to focus on the boy, and the reflected images would blur. But that's what you see with your eyes and that would be boring. That image would scream "amateur mistake" because who would want reflected images in the background? Since there was no way to remove the reflections from the flourescent lights, I had to think about it in a different way and see beyond the obvious.

This is an image I would never had been able to make just a few years ago. I took me a while to get the meaning of what the reflections were telling me, for my eyes did not see this interpretation. Once I did, I composed the frame with the boy and the green background, focussed on the reflected images and opened the aperture to wide open at f/2.8, knowing that would blur the boy's face. Then, of course, the other trick to photojournalism is to not be shy to shoot because with digital, images are essentially free. So, I fired off about 30 other frames with various compositions and exposures. Then later I can decide which image works best.

There are multiple meanings behind this image. On one level, it could say that nobody really sees the boy as he is (i.e., he's a blur). On another, it could say that behind the boy is a complex world with various compartments and other selves.

What does this image say to you?

For those who are interested, there are some excellent books on photographic "seeing" and composition. They are:

• Andreas Feininger, Principles of Composition in Photography (1972, not in print so you would most likely find it at a local library)
• Michael Freeman, The Photographer's Eye (2007)
• Freeman Patterson, Photography and the Art of Seeing (1985, but updated in a 2004 edition)
• Bryan Peterson, Learning to See Creatively (1988, but updated in a 2003 edition)
• Henry Poore, Pictorial Composition in Art (1976 and still in print)

For other psychologically meaningful photographs on Mind Parts, see my Photography Gallery.

I first learned about Wordle from a post last month by fragmentz. The other day Castorgirl made the post "Lost for Words". They both got me motivated!

I am a firm believer that diversified means of expression are necessary for healing, especially for those of us who struggle with dissociative problems. But, one could easily argue that this is important for any person to live a healthy life! Being able to express ourselves in different ways helps us be more flexible, encourages creativity, and just plain makes us more interesting people.

The connection to dissociative problems is particularly important. Through dissociation, we become accustomed to having parts of us handle very specific areas of life in mostly extremely rigid ways. If you look at such a person as a whole, one would most likely see all the variety that person possesses, and rigidity would probably not be the word that would come to mind to describe the whole person. Instead, the most common phrase I hear is "remarkably adaptive". That's little comfort most times to the person who routinely dissociates. The experience for someone who routinely dissociates in more extreme ways is usually one of fragmentation, lost time, and discontinuity.

The prognosis for dissociative disorders is good, I think, because we already have within us the necessary components to live interesting and creative lives most everyone strives for. I am not meaning to trivialize the process of healing or the struggles we face, but healing really is within our grasp and the destination is, I think, a wonderful place to end up and the journey itself isn't that bad either.

Art therapy, some aspects of my photography, piano, writing, and poetry have been very helpful in my healing. They have all provided ways to bridge what I know intellectually in my brain with what I feel in my heart. In many ways, through these means, I've been able to create a sort of glue that holds all the pieces of me together.

Wordle is very easy to use. In the simplest way, you can just enter a list of words in a form, and it will create a visual representation for you. More advanced uses allow the ability to weight the sizes of particular words and assign colors. From there, you can use the menus to decide how you want the software to lay out the words. You don't have strict control over word placement. But you can fiddle with the settings and create as many variations as you want.

I suggest to make screen captures as you go along because the software doesn't have a history function. Further I suggest you keep your list of words (and size and color tags if you use them) in a text editor. Then if you want to change anything, just change it in the text editor and paste that into the form.

What does what I created mean? The short answer is that these are the words taken from my "Contract" that have particular meaning to me. I weighted "Balance" the most, and that and "truth" are the only words in white. The pink words are kind of in the same class as balance. Grounding words are green. Nouns are in blue. Action oriented things I have to do to heal are in red. "God" is in purple.

To create your own, head on over to: Wordle.

For something similar, yet different, check out Tagul. It gives more control than Wordle, but many of the things it does you can do in a text editor with a little script control. But it's worth checking out.

Finally, if you are interested in words, see Visuwords, an online graphical dictionary and thesaurus.

If you click on the image above, you will see a higher resolution image.

One of the more interesting, and also infuriating, debates is the question of whether dissociative identity disorder (DID) is real or not. Some say it should be subsumed under another disorder (usually borderline personality disorder is the most often mentioned) and that it's a harmful diagnosis and causes those labelled with it to unnecessarily suffer. Many of these people also say that the disorder is largely iatrogenic, meaning caused by the process of therapy or caused by a societal pressure.

In 15 Years Ago and the Great Debate, I wrote about this in a largely naive and idealistic manner. I'm not so much naive or idealistic nowadays.

The issue can get quite complicated, in part because those of us with dissociative disorders commonly switch in and out of self states based on our level of internal presence or cohesiveness or external demands. It's not uncommon to be in a part of ourselves who thinks nothing is wrong. We have learned to partition things so well, that doing so is not all that hard. Then we can easily agree with those who say it's not real. But these are merely denial states. The denial or seemingly "completely well" states often give us a little reprieve, but they rarely last long. When they do last long, it usually means there is a significant crash of reality to come.

The debate in the psychiatric community is really a "no win" debate. Not only are there conflicts about the reality of DID, but I am sure you all know there are conflicts about the validity of repressed memories. But that's a topic for another day. Both debates are not strictly "winnable" because each side does have some valid points. And each side is beholden to their point of view.

I sometimes do get sucked into these debates internally, but it never ends up in a good place for me. The internal debate attempts to mirror the external ones. And it just ends up causing a mass of confusion. The best place to be is to avoid the external debate and be true to your own experience. That is, if you can do that.

About 6 months ago, I had a discussion with a psychiatrist I know about whether what I experience is "real" or not. She answered by telling a Chinese proverb:

Then she said: "The interpretation that I read, said that the response was meant to negate the question, not to answer it. For centuries there has been debate and discussion of whether or not the dog has a Buddha nature. Just like there is debate and discussion about whether or not there is DID. But I like the interpretation that says Zhaozhou intended to negate the question, because I think that theological hair-splitting wouldn't get the young monk any closer to enlightenment and that a wise teacher like Zhaozhou would have known that. Indeed, my favorite interpretation of this story says that Zhaozhou's answer meant 'It doesn't matter!'"

It's very hard to be in a place where you can just say "It doesn't matter." But, really, I think this is the answer. If we can trust in our own experience and keep working at trying to make sense of it, then this is all we can ask of ourselves. It's not for others to judge our experience or tell us it isn't so. There is a lot of suffering that those of us with dissociative disorders have to come to terms with; but the suffering doesn't lessen by forcing yourself to believe that your internal experience isn't real. Just because it doesn't manifest itself in a simple blood test, doesn't mean it's not real. I like to think our job is to work at becoming more whole. We can have a chance at doing this only if we acknowledge our internal reality. Our internal truth.

Others will debate it for many years to come. Let them do that. And let us heal!

Here are some early morning ramblings after not sleeping all night.

I was reading an interview just a little while ago, on the somewhat unrelated topic of "intelligence gathering", and this was said:

I thought it was a rather interesting comment, because intelligence gathering and trauma healing are not so dissimilar. But I think he missed the point a bit.

I like to think of healing as having to put together a bunch of puzzle pieces (with a lot missing and without the picture). But on those puzzle pieces are the little dots, and as you put the puzzle together, patterns start to emerge and you get better and better at predicting and making decisions.

This photograph is of some work I did with my therapist last summer. I painted puzzle pieces of various sizes and arranged them in a way that made some visual sense to me. I had many color options, but I chose only red, white and black. We never quite finished, having intended to go back and rearrange and reshoot. The pieces are still sitting in my therapist's office on top of her bookshelf. Perhaps we'll take them out again soon.

On my A Healing Journey page you will see an image of a dissociative identity (DID) awareness pin. And if you follow the link on the bottom of that page you will see another. I took the inspiration from these, and Castorgirl's blog header.

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!

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.

My last post talked about music's role in my life and in my healing, with particular emphasis on Beethoven and his Eroica symphony.

What I want to do here is a bit more provocative and focussed. In that last post, I mentioned Beethoven's Große Fugue. In my opinion, that piece is in a class all by itself and has the power to have an unfathomable impact on those of us who live with complex mental issues, and dissociative disorders in particular.

The fugue was written along with Beethoven's five late quartets from 1825-26 (he died in 1827). I'll give a small musical analysis of this piece only so that readers can see why this piece would mean something to someone who deals with a dissociative disorder.

There are countless works of art and music which grapple with complexity. In the music world, the quartets of Bartók and Schoenberg are in that extreme. Michael Jackson's "This is It" movie reviews are fawning over the glimpses into his musical creativity, but (and I'm showing extreme bias here) can you imagine the disparity if a similar documentary were made showing live footage of Beethoven creating some of his master works?

For me, the Große Fugue is a journey into complexity which mirrors the complexity of my inner workings. If I can manage to actually pay attention to it for its entirety, I find it incredibly soothing and validating (which is probably a bit counter-intuitive). What's amazing is that it is a marriage between the pleasing sonata and abstract musical constructs. There are myriad changing keys, rhythms, and tempi. Musical concepts which stop and start unexpectedly and, some would say, and correctly so, violently. There's an incredible amount of dissonance (notes which sound "unpleasant") and counterpoint which makes sense of distinct melodies, causing notes to work against other notes.

The piece starts out with several broad strokes of clear musical ideas in several fits and starts. Each one of these ideas could be taken by itself and go on its own and present a perfectly pleasing piece. But Beethoven doesn't do that. Instead, he throws all these ideas out there, almost like he's saying "I could do this, or that, or this other." But then he launches into what could be perceived as chaos; a first fugue in B-flat that is nearly impossible to follow. Objectively, most people would hear this and say it's "quite unpleasant". In fact, when it debuted in 1826 as the last movement to the quartet in B-flat, the response was so uncomprehending that Beethoven was forced to change the ending by his publisher and issue the Große Fugue as a standalone work. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Beethoven go that news from his publisher!

Eric Lewis, violinist in the Manhattan String Quartet, described this piece by saying: That piece is beyond all analogy in art, and so I reach for this image; a cosmic storm where the laws of the universe are transmuted in gravitational tides so strong they destroy the known laws of harmony. The G-flat section is a reprise between the two event horizons where time is non-existent. Paradoxical states of consciousness are made understandable and prepare one for the final journey through the A-flat fugue to a vision of a parallel universe in another dimension. I am sure Beethoven took that journey and left his impressions of that universe.

So, I ask: Who knows more about parallel universes than the dissociative?

For those of us who struggle with dissociation or internal parts of our personality that gets in the way of our functioning, we are constantly trying to explain our internal world to ourselves and to others in order to make sense of it and heal. To my ears (and heart and mind), the Große Fugue is Beethoven making sense of my experience. Thank you Herr Beethoven!

For an interesting article, see: Alex Ross' Great Fugue, The New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2006.

For video of this piece, see: Alban Berg Quartet on YouTube, Part I (and also Part II); it's no substitute for a quality audio recording.

Finally, a friend of mine shared with me a TED talk on music which you may find enjoyable. See: Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion; albeit he speaks of a different type of classical music from the one discussed here.

Ludwig van Beethoven is unquestionably the world's most famous composer. And he is so for good reason. He is a "universal" composer, with an unprecedented ability to translate the extreme range of human emotion into musical form that can appeal to the casual listener as well as present huge challenges to even the most savvy musicians. He is extremely original, yet practically anyone can recognize a piece as being written by him. There are some exceptions, most notably the Große Fugue, written only a couple years before his death when he was completely deaf.

I was exposed to Beethoven through my paternal grandfather who owned the complete symphonies on vinyl recorded by Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. For some reason, probably due to my musical non-sophistication, I was fixated on the most popular 5th symphony, never appreciating any of his others. At the time, back in the 70s, that was pretty much my whole musical world. Nothing much else existed. I would "conduct" to that recording of that one symphony in private, pretending I was signaling to the violin section or the horn section to sing louder or softer or with more expression. This piece gave me strength; strength I did not have in real life.

When I started to play classical piano, I immediately turned to Beethoven. I played many of his easier early student pieces (e.g., minuets and German dances) found in my student compilations, but quickly fell in love with his sonatas even though much was beyond my technical capabilities. They were insanely difficult for me, especially since I was not taught for very long. But I really couldn't stand having a teacher. I wanted to be left alone with the music. It was personal. I wanted to play the real emotional and difficult pieces, figure them out for myself, make them my own, and then feel the emotion as I was playing. Not surprisingly, I started with the first movement to the Moonlight Sonata (no. 14), and then learned the first movements to the Pathetique (no. 8), Appassionata (no. 23), and Funeral March (no. 12).

I focussed on memorizing the notes so I could play without having to think, but rather by purely pouring myself into the music from an emotional place; people say I often bite my lower lip and make contorted facial expressions when I play. Luckily I don't have to see myself! Eventually, I learned some of the other movements from these sonatas, with the only one I truly mastered being the adagio cantabile second movement to the Pathetique, which I believe to be one of the most beautiful melodies ever written for any instrument. When I was young and didn't have words to express what was happening to me, I would play these and other pieces. It was my subconscious way, I believe, of talking—of crying out—even though nobody, even me, understood what I was really trying to say or what was really happening to me.

I discovered Beethoven's Third Symphony (Eroica) when I was a bit older and listened to it incessantly, especially the second "death" movement or funeral fugue. Whenever I needed to feel I would listen to it. Eventually, when I got a job and had money, I started to venture to record stores and discovered that there was more to classical music than what I was exposed to. I started to build a CD collection. There was Mozart, Casals, Pärt, Bach, Brahms, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Faure, Schubert, and Haydn, to name but a few. And there were other periods of music for me. Somehow I was absent from any knowledge of 70s rock. I was into Journey and the anthem bands of the 80s. Then Nirvana and Green Day in the 90s. Classic blues in the late 90s. I amassed hundreds of CDs.

In the 90s, I started going to concerts of all types. And about two or three years ago, with a new iPod and great headphones, I started seriously listening to classical and choral music once again.

I listen a lot to Beethoven's String Quartets, String Trios, and Symphonies nos. 3, 6 (especially the fourth movement), 7, and 9 (especially the last movement). I've returned to choral music (e.g., Mozart's glorious Requiem). I tend not to like light baroque music, but rather intricate, rich, and deep choral without soloists that seems to explore the subconscious much like Beethoven does for me in his Eroica. After a long search including Allegri, Bach, Casals, Pallestrina, Purcell, Tallis, Tavener, and many others, I have settled on a short list. Barber's Agnus Dei is simple, but evokes emotion. Faure's Requiem is incredible, and Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine is one of the most sublime choral works I have ever heard. There are some Masses I like: Mozart's Mass in C-minor and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in D-major. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is a master at combining simple and uncluttered melodies that are unpredictable, called minimalist. Like Beethoven's Eroica, Pärt sends me on an exhilarating journey of self discovery.

And, over the past couple years, I fell in love again with Beethoven's Eroica. Eventually, as I began to get better mental health-wise, I heard more in it. I started understanding it. Listening to this piece is like exploring my inner landscape extreme emotions and realities.

I have talked before about how recovering from dissociation is about being aware of, coming to terms with, and learning to navigate around extreme experiences. There is perhaps no other piece of music which captures this better than Beethoven's Eroica. When I listen to this symphony, I hear the messages buried not at all subtly within it. To get the most out of it, you have to listen to what it's saying.

The symphony starts out with two almost obnoxious E-flat chords that scream out to pay attention. Then it soars majestically. The cellos begin, then the violas and second violins provide the inner voices and rhythm. It's pure intimacy. Melodies get passed from section to section, changing a little each time, just like a healing journey. There's an entire incomprehensible landscape of emotional extremes. There's meandering, conflict through harmonic dissonance and "switching" keys. It goes from one end of the human experience to the other end in a very short time. This quickly going from one extreme to another spoke to me profoundly. This was precisely my experience!

But the most meaningful part of the piece for me is the fugue that comes in the middle of the second movement (at Bar 113) with an amazing use of counterpoint, and at Bar 145 he attains heavenly heights. The movement is all about death. It starts off almost in a whisper and this enormously sad melody gets passed from the strings to the oboe. Back and forth. Suddenly the fugue begins. It's the most beautiful two minutes of music I have ever heard. The fugue builds and builds seemingly without end. It cries out with sad strings and then blaring horns. But then it hangs up in the air with unbelievable tension before it collapses. Suddenly, the horns come in and there's power. How is this possible? There's a march. Trumpets provide the melody and strings provide the background. Then the melody from the beginning returns. Who would have guessed? It meanders again, like it has lost its way. And the movement ends like it begins, in a mere whisper. Was everything in between merely an illusion? Did it really happen? Sad. Indeed, even after this emotional journey, this is not the end of this grand symphony. There's more to come. More sadness. And more triumph.

I ground myself to Beethoven's music. Listening to him makes me feel authentic and it makes me realize that the complexity inside my head is all right. The complexity in Beethoven's music is like a kindred spirit. And I can literally look inside myself. What a great gift this man who lived 200 years ago has given me!

Some of you may be wondering what's happened since my last post. Another piece that is equally as amazing as the Eroica is the Große Fugue. It's not, however, easy listening music. This piece is almost a direct mapping of the internal chaos I felt over the last week or more. When I'm in the midst of that chaos, I feel like I'm in a bottomless pit. I can't make sense of anything. Somehow the other night I had the good sense to play the Große Fugue, and almost immediately everything made sense in my head. It was like taking a magic pill!

For a related writing on music on this site, see Music and Heart Healing; if you have not seen this post and have any sort of interest in music, you should check it out.

Two excellent books on Beethoven are "Beethoven: The Universal Composer" by Edmund Morris and "Beethoven: His Spiritual Development" by J. W. N. Sullivan.

For a wonderful explanation of Beethoven's Eroica, you may find PBS' Keeping Score with Michael Tilson Thomas a very worthwhile watch.

For a musical analysis of Eroica, see W. A. Dewitt's Beethoven's Eroica site.

It's been a while since I've posted here, or done much of anything to support my healing in any meaningful way (e.g., writing in my private journal, taking time to check-in with myself, read the survivor blogs I follow). To be honest, everything has changed over the last several weeks. The need to be functional while my wife was away completely changed the internal dynamics in dramatic fashion. On the surface, I appear my old self again (going back to over a decade ago). I am able to do almost anything, with unusual ease.

But this functionality has come at a huge, unacceptable, price.

I had thought that old all-encompassing coping mechanisms were largely a thing of the past. Sure, they become a problem now and again, but they never took hold like they used to. Over the past year or two, I have focused on true healing. I have been determined to not have the dissociative walls be so severe. I have been determined to communicate. I have been determined to understand what other parts of me were feeling. I have been determined to accept.

It's one of the worst experiences to think that you have evolved and conquered the most severe symptoms, only to have many of them return with full intensity and over such a short timespan. In just a few short weeks, all the acceptance I had cultivated for the past couple years has completely disappeared. The concept of internal parts evaporated (even though I know my life is now radically compartmentalized). I cannot talk at all about feelings. I am in complete denial about any abuse history, in fact relating it to the famous Tawana Brawley case of the late 80s. And I have seriously thought of quitting therapy, for I am having trouble seeing the point of it; this despite the fact that therapy has been a major component of my life and a huge reason for the progress I've made.

What has happened is something I never thought was possible. The reverting back to total compartmentalization has meant that each part does what it does best, with very little knowledge sharing between them. This strategy removes accountability. It removes conflict. Life has become autonomous realities and the compartments are all flourishing just as this coping strategy is meant to accomplish. Just as it was 20 or 30 years ago. Certainly, a lot of that flourishing is welcomed. Work, for example, has become easy, without all the customary anxiety, and I am able to perform at the level people are used to. My wife loves the new (i.e., old) me too.

But the self-harm compartments have equally flourished. They are so isolated that I have such little sense of what they are about. Some are objectively super dangerous and even life threatening, but because I don't feel much of anything and don't really know about them, I don't really care. I know this is not a good position to be in.

I do now worry that I could easily become trapped in the old ways of coping, sucked in like a vortex. I do worry that all the work I have done to heal could become undone. I do worry that it could take me a long time to recover from this state if I don't act right away to change things. Because I have these worries, I hope that I can reduce the chances of my becoming trapped.

For my whole life I have put up with the self-harm as a necessary side effect of the functionality. I felt powerless to change any of it. Or more accurately, I didn't even know it was a problem or harmful. Since I didn't know there could be any other way, I just dealt with it. But I've learned that there is another way. This is what the healing I've been able to do has taught me.

I have lost site of the simple fact that healing is not compatible with not being safe from self-harm. Being safe and making the effort to be safe has to be our number one priority as survivors. The issue cannot be a secret. It cannot be ignored in therapy (or within ourselves). I know that dealing with it means that life gets more complicated and functioning goes down by some measures. That's a smaller price to pay than the price we have to pay for the very dangerous self-harm.

Somehow I need to get back to the place of acceptance and collaboration that has helped me heal. Right now, at this point, I have no idea how to get there given the stressors I have in my life with work, family and time of year.

There are certainly steps I know I can take based on what I've been able to do before. In the short term, this may mean going back to basic skills which I have taken for granted (or perhaps I find a bit beneath me). Kate's Grounding/Coping Skills Links are, for me, a good place to start. I also need to require myself to take the time to write and check-in on the inside.

I suppose healing and cultivating self-care is a choice. We can choose another path. For me, though, I made the decision long ago that healing is something I am committing myself to. Today marks the beginning of my reclaiming my safety, reclaiming who I am, and reclaiming some wholeness.

For a related discussion, see Are You Safe? on Scattered Pieces.

So, I'm in a particularly delicate position right now. Well, actually that's the problem. The position I'm in seems to change. From one extreme reality to another extreme reality. That's another post all to itself, which I will get to soon. But, the extreme changes have got me thinking...

Last week I posted my Giving Up Rant. I really was at rock bottom there and kind of stayed in this place. I guess I'm still there. Well, that's not true. I had a breakthrough on Saturday and then another this morning. But, I cannot easily keep track.

The week before that I posted My Take on What Healing Means. That was one of those "You can do it!" cheerleader posts. And just before that I posted Awakenings, which was that transformative experience when everything seemed to fit together just so perfectly.

So, I'm sort of taking stock of where I'm at. And I went through and looked at pretty much all of my previous posts dating back to April of this year when I started blogging. With the exception of some stray posts, they were all pretty much about the positive aspects of healing and, more or less, had to do with acceptance or working to get to that place of acceptance. Indeed, I wrote the Acceptance post upon leaving the hospital in August. I can easily see how I would be quite unhappy about all these posts when I am in the depths of despair.

It is precisely this "dichotomy" that has me taking stock.

I have been struggling a bit with whether the blog is really helpful for me. I think it is. The wonderfully supportive comments from all of you kind and caring people helped me stay in this place of acceptance. I appreciate them all for their validation and ability to get me to think. I especially like it when people offer alternative views. Largely, the blog allows me to synthesize my healing journey and put a good face on it, so to speak. I think that's good. But it's not enough. It doesn't fully respect the parts of me who really aren't on board with this process and fight against it. And it presents a sort of unitary voice, the sort of intellectual voice.

I know that for me, framing things in an intellectual kind of way is self-protective. I want to appear coherent and as least mentally fragmented as possible. Of course, this sort of gets in the way of acceptance. And along the way I sort of think I end up minimizing the struggle.

My private journal, which has many entries per day, contains far too much minutia for anyone to make sense of (usually myself included). And far too many extreme situations. Drama, some would say. So, that's where this blog has a real role in my healing. The blog is an at least twice a week healing exercise for me. And, usually, I write my posts at the tail end of a couple hour grounding process before or after therapy.

My hope is that I will start to change a bit how I put myself out here on the blog. I may start to include more of what the struggles are. I want to be able to talk about the scary parts. The parts that don't want to heal. I think that's the next evolution for the site. I think it will make the site more real, and in the process be more helpful to more of me.

Somewhat unrelated, but in keeping with the "blog carnival" theme, I wanted to point your browsers to Dr. Gudrun Frerichs' recently posted articles:

• Achieving Co-Consciousness
• Self-Acceptance and Love
• Healing Narcissistic Self-Parts
• Trauma Work

I found them to be quite in line with the language I use myself and how I understand where I want to go and what healing is all about. I hope you find them helpful too. I may look at them more closely and write about them in the coming days and weeks to come.

My friend castorgirl at Scattered Pieces recently posted What is healing? It's precisely the question I need to ask myself today.

I, too, have been saddled by questions recently such as Where am I going?, What's the point of all this hard work?, Where's the progress?, How long will this take?, and on and on.

There are times when I can see that I've made huge progress and times when I am so mired in flashbacks or internal confusion that I feel right back where I was decades ago. There are times when I am super-functional and times when I cannot get out of bed. There are times when I am fully connected to my children and family and times when I cannot clearly recognize them. There are times when I feel so full of insight and times when I feel like these are insights that any child should be able to have or cannot put two and two together. There are times when my body feels so healthy and times when I am wracked with pain. There are times when I feel so full of life and times when I feel like dying.

The experience of those of us who have lived lives through dissociative coping and are healing is chock full of contradictions like these. It absolutely must be that way. All those contradictions have been with us forever. That's really not at all new. We simply weren't aware of them before. For most of our lives, we have survived precisely by avoiding the very contradictions we now must face. It was an ingenious strategy. It worked wonderfully when we needed it to. But many of us find that it is severely limiting in the here and now.

Healing, to me, means a commitment to increasing awareness and a commitment to continue to cultivate that awareness despite the short term pains it may give us. I have written before that healing is a messy thing. It's very messy! It's full of friction. Sometimes the price we pay for that awareness seems overwhelming and too much to bear. "We cannot do it anymore!" we often find ourselves writing (or screaming out loud).

But, there are glimpses of what that awareness can ultimately lead to. Otherwise, we wouldn't continue down the healing path.

It may mean being able to curb harmful behaviors. It may mean being able to sometimes genuinely "feel", whether it be experiencing sorrow or grief or joy or love or anger. It may mean being able to sometimes see yourself for who you really are; the big picture, so to speak.

If you are now saddled with contradictions, you have already made the decision that you want something more than what dissociation can give you.

The process of healing through increased awareness is the process of personal change and growth. It's not linear. It's not for the faint of heart. It takes courage. It takes strength. It takes hope and perseverance. For many, it takes faith in something greater than ourselves.

If any of this resonates with you, congratulations. I wish you well in your healing journey.

What does healing mean to you?

Awakenings is a 1990 film based on the true story of doctor Oliver Sacks' efforts in the late 1960s to help patients at a hospital in the Bronx who had been victims of an atypical form of encephalitis. Also known as "sleepy sickness", this form of encephalitis left some victims catatonic and was a worldwide epidemic just after World War I.

I remember the movie as having a huge impact on me. I was fascinated that these patients were so "absent" and the fictionalized Dr. Sayer (played by Robin Williams) made such an effort to "reach" them when most had given up. The movie was dramatic and showed Dr. Sayer finding that he could get through their catatonic states by throwing a ball at them which some caught or playing certain pieces of music which generated emotional reactions in some others. After learning of the use of L-Dopa on Parkinson's patients, Dr. Sayer tried it on his own with dramatic results. The patients experienced "awakenings" and were in complete touch with reality, although their loss of decades was puzzling to them.

It's a sad tale because the healing effects of the miraculous drug did not last. One of the patients, Leonard played by Robert DeNiro, became romantically involved with a woman during his awakening. But eventually began to experience a reemergence of symptoms and then returned to his catatonic state, as did all the other patients despite increases in the drug.

While an extreme example, this story has parallels to the lives of dissociatives. This has become clear to me over the past year or so as I've been able to pay more attention inside.

Dissociation is a "presence disorder". I could describe a lot of my experiences as being "absent" from the perspective of various parts of my psyche. For most of us, the way our systems have been set up allows only a small part of us to be engaged in life at any given time. In some ways, part of us is alive and most of us is catatonic. That's an exaggeration, of course, but perhaps not too much. While I realize that internal parts have their own interactions with the outside world which can exist in parallel with other parts, their awareness is not always present with other parts. Dissociation (and DID) is about fluctuating levels of consciousness.

This weekend I had a remarkable experience. I felt alive.

It was an "awakening" for me of the sort I had not experienced in quite some time. In reality I did not do so much. I did some yard work. I cleaned the house. I played with the kids. I went to a neighborhood party. And, yes, I do these things regularly. But this weekend's experience was different. It was not just a matter of having excess energy. "All of me" was more present and the enthusiasm for life was way beyond what is normal for me.

I also played "Capture the Flag" right alongside my kids and the neighbor kids. My kids have been playing that game for years and I never bothered to ask about it. Yesterday, to their enjoyment and amazement, I asked to play. I felt like a 10 year old in an adult body. But It did not at all feel bad. It felt great. I cannot even say I felt dissociated or that I switched. It felt normal.

I remember saying all weekend: "This is how I want my life to be."

When we all came in and got ready for bed, I ended up reading out loud to my oldest daughter. It seemed so natural, I enjoyed it immensely and read with excitement. Then I could not help but recall that I have not read out loud to her for several years. I could not for the life of me understand why that was the case. We used to read out loud almost every night. We went through most of the Nancy Drew mysteries. Again, my "awakening".

So, as she fell asleep, I could not help wonder where I would end up in the coming days. Would the awakening continue? Or would it, like in the story of those unfortunate patients, disappear?