Recently in Healing Category

I am still working at trying to find ways to deal with what I have termed a psychological suicide attempt. I keep telling myself that if one is lucky to survive such attempts, there is the opportunity for recovery and healing.

After my pre-Christmas hospital stay, I arrived at a solution that I needed something new in therapy. I felt I needed new forms of expression, that I had outgrown the art and music and writing and now needed to focus on physical means of expression.

I find myself back in the hospital again prompted by a similar "attempt." The fact that I only managed to stay out of the hospital for three days has compelled me to take a close look inside.

On the surface, it seems that I am doing all the right things. So, it was natural for me to seek an additional tool or pursue a new direction.

I quite quickly found here that I had not at all outgrown art and music and writing as expressions that lead to learning and healing, but that I was doing them in an isolation of sorts. I would not at all go so far as to say I was merely going through the motions. But it has been something akin to that. I thought I could get all the healing benefits from what I used to do, but with significantly less effort. What made it hard for me was that it was rather easy to convince myself that there was no decrease at all in effort.

I will take my paper journals as an example. I have done art (and writing) in paper-based journals for years, but my output has dropped to nearly zero for well over a year. I had found a new tool. I used electronic system maps. Additionally, the monthly word counts in my private electronic journal began to jump significantly. Looking at this globally, the effort was merely shifted. But, really, what had found an easier way to work that gave me far less information and was far less helpful and far less healing.

My therapist brought me a couple of my older journals from a few years ago, and I was just immediately floored. The 120 pages in each were filled in a matter of weeks, with art, with statements, with dialog, questions, answers, pain, joy, anger. There was a huge amount of information and expression. Most of it was extremely hard to see and read. And every page was eye opening.

I realized that I was not doing that now. So, I decided to dedicate more of myself to this type of work. I know that means not just here in the hospital, but out in my regular life. And I also know that may require some sacrifices.

Yesterday, on a weekend day without any groups, I was here with a friend I have known for a long time. We were talking about using art as a means of expression and healing. We decided to do an "art therapy" group together. I came up with the directive: "Draw about your major obstacle facing you right now."

I drew about the divide between the two "camps" of me.

In the "left camp" are the parts of me who are very comfortable with all the healing language. We know what those words are. We use them all the time in therapy. The left has seen enormous growth. There has been a huge surge in functionality. I am able to juggle work and family and therapy. I have achieved major accomplishments at work that I thought I would never achieve again. I have become completely reliable at home, and taken on more and more in my community. Who can have a problem with that? The left paints a very nice picture for the world that is "socially acceptable" and "socially appreciated." Of course, it is very appealing for me and easy to use that growth as the measure of my progress.

If the "left camp" was the totality of who I am or even the great majority of who I am, there would really not be a problem. But, it is a fact of my life that there is an enormous "right camp" that needs to be attended to at least as much as the left. And it has not been. The result of such complete focus on the "left camp" lead to huge jealousy and anger from the right camp, and that lead to a serious lack of safety.

The obstacle, for me, is getting some communication and collaboration over that divide and over that bridge. The path is the art. The expression.

In the image, the "right camp" is straining against the river. Overflowing. Looking for a way across. Trying to communicate. There is huge effort from the right. I know it is easy to say that the actions of this camp are so harmful and hard to imagine that they want any help. Our focus has become only about stopping the actions. But that is an approach they cannot understand. It is a mismatch of language.

The only way to heal is to give the "right camp" a path. A new outlet. Or a new lease on old outlets. By the "left camp" being more accepting and understanding that the "right camp" is as much a part of us as any other. The irony in all of this, is that the "left camp" fully knows life is not perfect. The left expends so much energy to keep everything contained and looking good and strong.

Balance was my word for 2011. In many ways, there has been balance this year. But the balance has been so precarious. The balance came at a huge cost as it was achieved merely through division.

For 2012, we need a new word. Balance is still the goal, it always will be, but we will achieve it through unity. For me, unity does not mean we will all be one. Unity means more about being on the same team. United. Working on the same goal. Supporting each other. Harmony.

I have hurt myself, sometimes quite seriously, many times. It is difficult to rank serious self-harm and suicidal events because one must take into account both the physical and psychological damage. But while there is a good deal of subjectivity involved, there is no question that what I did to myself last week ranks up there as among the most serious in my lifetime.

Physical damage is what most use to rank such events because it is quantifiable. Like many others, I have taken dozens of overdoses over the years. Two of them were clearly different from all the rest. They were the ones which were especially calculated. They involved taking many times the lethal dose. And they were preceded by taking sedatives so that I would not be able to change my mind and go to anyone for help afterwards. Those were obviously serious physically and I was lucky to have survived them many years ago.

Hurting myself in the present often involves recreating the past by finding others to hurt me, either virtually or in real-life. This has gone on for years, is often an instinctive response, and is something I am ashamed of. It has been damaging because I have perpetuated the abuse done to me and has led to all sorts of problems. What makes it difficult is that most of the problems are psychological and comparatively easier to hide.

As I have healed, the more I appreciate the extent of the psychological damage of this kind of self harm. To put it into some context, long ago when parts of me were much more separated, these self harm events were more isolated. While it undoubtedly caused psychological damage, those hurt parts had little or no understanding of where their distress was coming from.

Without question, increased awareness and internal communication—whether one has dissociated identities or not—are necessary components to healing and tools to help keep us safe. But there are no guarantees of safety. When safety is breached, the increased awareness leads to a totally different perspective of the effects of this type of self abuse.

What happened last week was arguably, for me by my own scale, the most serious event of its kind ever by many measures. To call it self harm or self abuse is not even adequate. Self harm was the terminology I used a decade ago. Self abuse was the terminology I began using a few years ago. What happened last week was a psychological suicide attempt. I think it is important for me to be as precise as possible and not cloak what happened with more polite terminology.

A couple days ago, I did an analysis of both the events and feelings which has led me to label what happened in such a unambiguous way. While a lot of the actual events are lost or in flashes, I have enough information to know that what happened was in a totally different class from past events. I also have hard data. I had numerous entries in my private journal, text messages, and phone logs in the hours leading up to what happened. I have a perspective that is much clearer than any similar event before.

But the saddest piece comes not from the actual harmful events. Not from what was done to my body or done to my psyche.

The plan from the night before was to be admitted to the hospital, where I am now. I had become too unstable, too fragmented, and too much at risk. I told my therapist I needed some time to tie up some loose ends at work and do some last minute preparations. I was to be in hospital admissions by 6PM. That was the agreement I made.

It turned out that I was not grounded enough to be trusted with such an agreement or such an amount of time on my own.

I know there was internal conflict about getting hurt that day. That conflict usually is what keeps me safe. But there was very little sense of reality and no sense of ground. And, so, "safety" and "getting hurt" existed as their own isolated parallel threads. That dynamic of polar opposites existing simultaneously increased the safety risk manyfold.

At one point, I was at a tibetan arts store to get my wife, who is into yoga, a Christmas gift. Amidst all the confusion and fragmentation, at 1:45PM I wrote these words in my journal: "Healing. Went to the tibetan store for a present. Big shift now towards safety. But confusion and conflict too." That nearly led to a change of course to not get hurt. But it was not enough.

At the store, I also searched for a gift for my therapist. I thoroughly explored the shop and what I found for her was a compassion stone. It is a small stone from India with the "Om mani padme hum" mantra on compassion in Tibetan script . This is sad because it is proof that there were enormous coexisting efforts to be safe and also to be hurt.

While it certainly feels like my "gift" to my therapist is tainted, I hope we can take from this something positive.

This stone, then, obviously has critical significance. It perhaps should sit in my therapist's office, or be accessible to us. We should use it as a reminder of how the desperate effort to be safe and compassionate was destroyed—within minutes.

For me, that stone will probably be my most important icon in the world. It is something tangible from that horrible day. It will mean more to me than the medical records I have from the major overdoses. More than poems I have written from long ago about sad events and abuse. More than any art work I have made. Even more than records I have from the Catholic Church.

That stone represents the fact that I made a choice. That stone embodied all of my hope. It embodied all of my compassion. And I, and I alone, made the choice to destroy all of that.

I will never forget that.

And now I have to pick up the pieces and recreate what I have destroyed.

My records say I wrote this poem in 1993, nearly 19 years ago. It is incredibly difficult for me to realize that so long has past. But it has.

I learned three huge lessons that I could not possible have had any perspective on back then.

First, that only I can rescue myself. I probably had heard that many times, but it had absolutely no meaning for me. Now, I know I can have help, and often a lot of it. And while, in the poem, I found my own arms useless, ultimately I end up in a far better place when I am holding myself.

Second, back then I only saw undesirable parts of myself as enemies. This did not come up in the poem, but this was a fact of life for me. I had zero compassion for myself. As compassion grew, the drive to keep parts isolated from one another lessened.

Third, that it is possible to cultivate hope. I was totally lost back then, had zero hope, and clearly saw myself mostly as a victim and not empowered.

These three are tightly coupled and I have come to believe that these are the main ingredients needed to heal. At least that seems to be the case for myself.

I suppose what I wrote about back then was the best I could do: hold on, without knowing why, even though I thought there was no point to it.

As I reflect on what I wrote so long ago, I do have a sense that I have come a long way. But many of the same struggles remain. I will often find myself in a state where every word of this poem is an accurate representation of the present-day moment. But what is different now is that it does not remain that way.

While it was undoubtedly not a good position to be so constantly in a state of hopelessness, it was sort of comfortable for me in a sad kind of way. Now there is a new challenge, namely the delicate dance between hopefulness and hopelessness.

In order to progress in my healing, I have to face inconsistencies, conflicts, and dilemmas head on. That is the friction of healing I often write about. It is the hard work of healing. And that hard work is not optional.

Sure, I can be knocked down, and that happens all the time. But now when I get up it is often with purpose. I now know why I fight. I have long thought that I fight because of my wife and kids. Of course that is part of it. But I truly fight for myself. I fight to heal.

All of us live in a world of cycles.

Cycles, I think, are meant to be double-edged swords. They are the necessary friction of life that I have talked about before.

In the best of cases, we use these predictable cycles as a means of helping us navigate through the phases of our lives. Many of us probably recognize how these are sometimes referred: familiarity, teachable moments, evolution, wisdom, maturity.

We are probably all aware of how a new cycle can serve as a clean slate. When I was in school, every September I was fond of saying "I don't have a single poor grade!" Or, we are probably also aware of a sense of comfort in what is familiar. Every Spring is a time of renewal. Most every Christmas has been a time of magical wonder. I live in an area of the world that snows right around Christmas-time and that serves as a metaphorical punctuation mark.

But, anniversaries of traumatic events and triggers are also types of cycles. And therein lies the friction. And the dichotomy.

Speaking for myself, I know I can very easily find myself trapped in a new cycle and have little or no perspective on it. In other words, the cycle can be strictly seen from a historical point of view. In still other words, parts of me can be stuck in the past.

I so dislike admitting that. I would rather believe that I am full of awareness and am fully healed and fully safe. Period.

But that is simply not true.

For those of us who have lived many years using dissociation as a core means of coping or navigating through cycles or triggers of past trauma, this is not really difficult to fathom.

I have not written here in over a month, and during that time I have experienced many triggers and not navigated all of them well. Just ticking off some of the highlights, there was the perennial Halloween "holiday", with all its normally charged associations, plus we had a rare crippling snowstorm. Then the relentless news of the US college sports sex abuse scandals, which have rocked me to my core. It was not really much of a surprise, but I was caught unprepared by the impact of the late November "anniversaries" of major suicide attempts from the early 90s and the connections to where I was last year (in the hospital). Finally, "church abuse" news, direct or indirect, seems to always crop up.

Reflecting on the past month or two—I have lost track—I can easily say life has been more tilted towards disconnection and chaos and "living in the past" than it has been towards awareness and looking towards the future. My life has certainly not been in any sort of balance, and I have not been safe from purposely hurting myself. As a result, life has become extremely distorted and unstable, and what feels safe also does not feel safe, sometimes simultaneously. Some of you know will know what that statement really means.

I have been living precariously. There has been a thin line separating life and death, connection and disconnection, giving up and holding onto hope.

What is most scary, is that I do not even think I realized this!

But this afternoon, the seas have calmed. The compass appears to be working. The ship's wheel isn't spinning out of control anymore. The ship is moving forward. With direction. With purpose. I can see land.

Despite what our psychological "clocks" tell us, we arrive at a new cycle, but always at a place in time that is ahead of the last one. We may not appreciate that as a statement of fact in our times of struggle. But it is a fact. No matter how "in the past" parts of us may be, I strongly believe that we are destined to heal, to find balance, to learn from our past, to build a better future.

A note about the 'Expressive Arts Carnival.' I am sorry for the break in routine, but the carnival will be back with new activities next month.

This is the first photograph of mine that I posted here over 2 years ago. When pondering about what I would share as my "Hopes and Dreams" for this month's arts carnival, I thought about doing something new and creative. But this image captures the essence better than any other. So, I thought I would come back to it, but write about it in the present.

At the time I made this photograph, I was blossoming in terms of my commitment to external and internal awareness. Prior to this time, I had focused almost exclusively on intellectual understanding of my problems. And while that pursuit yielded good results, there was something missing and it was not enough. I quickly an important lesson: that the most healing comes from a balance between intellectual understanding and exploration on the one hand and emotional understanding and exploration on the other.

The context for this image is that "becoming one," or to use the common term of "integrating," had dominated my thinking for many years. That was my clear goal—or hope or dream—for so long. I finally realized that, for me, that set up an unresolved series of internal tensions. Becoming "one," in a strict sense, is not who I am. It never was. So, I said to myself: "Why make a goal for myself something that is not who I am?"

I now do not see integration as a goal. Rather I see as a goal for me a fluid collaboration based on mutual respect and understanding. In this view, there is more flexibility. Parts of me have the opportunity to flourish and be laser-focused if they need to be or work together with other parts of me to accomplish what we cannot separately.

Having somewhat separate parts of my personality is not the major problem facing me. It is having parts and not being able to be safe that is the problem. Or having parts and having there be no communication or collaboration, thereby rendering them fully isolated. I cherish my ability to be able to accomplish goals in life that I know are borne from my parts-based system; goals that I feel might not be possible without such a system.

So, the question for me has always been how to maintain safety and at the same time cultivate collaborations and communication leading to a more fluid existence? That is what this photograph represents. I had thought "becoming one" would automatically lead to safety and was the ultimate answer. But in many ways I believe that to be a draconian solution, and not even the best solution. I also thought it would someday just happen. After all, I have read stories of how others "integrated" and how it can happen very quickly.

The truth is, while I am not at all glorifying dissociative identities, I could not ever imagine such a solution for me. The more and more I get to know parts of me, the more I appreciate who they are, what they represent, and appreciate their own individual hopes and dreams and hurts and desires.

This photograph can be seen as "one." It is one wall after all. But it is made up of many pieces. On one scale, all parts of me can be seen as one, and this is how most people in my life see me and this is what I want most people to see. It is absolutely true that together we make up one person. One system. But I also acknowledge that the parts of my psyche are not just aspects of one personality. They are more separate, and I accept that.

And it is through that acceptance that I have learned to move towards a more balanced existence.

In my post from over two years ago, I wrote:

So, my hope and dream is for my life to be more representative of this image. That there be collaboration. That parts support other parts. That when viewed on a macro scale it appears as one. But on the micro scale it appears as many. That each part is different yet has similarities to others. And so on.

For those of you who have not submitted an entry for this month's Arts Carnival, submissions are extended through the end of September 27th (EST). I will publish on the 28th.

I know it has been a long while since I have written here and an even longer time since I have been reading other's blogs or in touch with friends both in my healing circle as well as other areas of my life. I have been basically out of it on so many levels, including internally, but still able to present a front of super functionality. After several months of this, I finally feel like I have found some stability. I learned a lot and I write more specifically about it soon.

Today, though, I want to make my contribution to this month's Expressive Arts Carnival. In the announcement for the Carnival, I did not say that I did this exercise before, a bit over a year ago while inpatient.

In thinking about this directive now and who I could possibly write about who has taught me, my thoughts go inside of me. I have learned the most about healing from me. That may sound like a "big ego" statement. But it is more a statement about acceptance of parts and an understanding that dissociated identities is fundamental to who I am.

I know I have talked about this many times before: When I get into a denial space internally and make statements that parts of me do not exist in the very separate way they do, I end up not being true to myself. And that truth is a necessity. That is what I have been missing over the last few, at least, months.

A good deal of healing comes from communicating with discrete parts. Of course, they are all connected and we are one person. But it is also true that I have evolved in a very compartmentalized way, and so learning about those compartments and building connections is what a lot of my healing journey is about.

Over the past few days, since I have found a sense of balance, the key thing I have done was to accept and listen inside. I stopped pushing parts of me away. I acknowledged all of them. That approach has changed everything for me. No longer am I so confused. No longer am I losing time. No longer am I so hugely distant from memories that I just pushed away. No longer do I have no understanding for my behavior, and why I was driven to self-harm.

Indeed, the past few days have been humbling for me. I now know that "I" is broad. I am more than "I" and that is something I must accept. It makes the journey more simpler in some ways (e.g., I gain more fluidity) and also more complicated in others (e.g., I have to own difficult feelings). But that is my reality. My path. And I am back on it.

My words for the Carnival are: Truth, Healing, Balance. And my hex color code is #855E42 (named "Dark Wood," which for me signifies being grounded like a tree).

The Carnival will be published tomorrow, on the last day of the month. If you want to make a last minute entry, please do so by 2PM EST July 31 and I will include it.

At this time last year, and the year before, I was in the midst of "internal disconnection." The same is true this year. And the same has been true at other times. I have always come to the conclusion that I am not well served when I am disconnected, and I have often spoke of how it leads to issues of safety. Disconnection is not consistent with my present-day philosophy on how I want to live my life and my direction in healing. But I am often at al loss for how to fix it.

Part of the issue maybe many of you will identify with, is that for parents, June is a really rough time of year. The school year ends in mid-June and there are a bevy of school-related activities. If you are an involved in helping in the schools, and I am, it can feel like a bit too much. There are concerts, field days, field trips, end-of-year PTO meetings, and the list goes on and on.

And, added to that is another ever-present issue: change. As I have worked on healing, I have become more aware of how I am affected by what is around me (events and people). No school for the kids means quite a drastic change. Seasonal change, especially in New England, is always dramatic. The weather also shifts from downright cold to hot. Work is in flux with colleagues vacation schedules; plus being in academia, summer is quite different.

No wonder all of this throws me (and probably you too). I often get thrown a lot. I feel like I am not very versatile anymore. What I used to handle purely by dissociating, now often feels terribly complicated. Nothing ever seems simple anymore.

But, over the years I have developed some "go to" skills. When I feel out of balance, like I do now, it is a reminder to go back to these basics.

The basics may appear on the surface to be quite simple, but they are often not at all easy to do (and are often easy to ignore). For me, though, the "nuts and bolts" are rather clear:

• Take time to self-reflect; and don't have therapy be the only time you practice this. My journal writing has mainly been reporting and very "diary like." I have used my journal in more substantial ways in the past, which means as an adjunct to therapy where I make sense of reactions and experiences.

• Practice mindfulness. This means actively paying attention to what the experiences are while you are going through life. If I am mowing the lawn, it helps to go slowly and appreciate what I am doing. If I am planting in the gardens, it helps to feel the soil and draw parallels to internal growth.

• Self-care needs to be often and regular. This means finding ways to get meaningful and consistent sleep, taking care of pain issues by self-soothing, and eating. It means also taking time to play (with the kids), not only being "in your head" and using music (playing or listening) as a healing tool.

• Art. Drawing and art making (including photography) is another tool I have used to give me access to feelings, which do not seem all that accessible right now. I often have resistance to doing art. And I often find that I will reconnect in this area by increasing my use of photography (which is happening now, so that is a positive).

If I thought more carefully, I probably could come up with a longer list. But these are the main areas that come to mind based on my experience.

My immediate reaction to these are: "OK, Paul, easy to say but hard to do." One could then say that the list is trite. Way too simple.

That thinking, however, is merely a trap.

I have often spoke of simple solutions. A dissociative mind by nature is a very complicated mind. In many ways I think we get accustomed to this. I have used metaphors in the past of the complexity of an orchestra leading to beautiful and harmonious music. I have spoken about sports teams and various specific roles each athlete has and how they can come together for one goal.

An attempt at simplifying is not at all to invalidate real difficulties. Rather simplifying and practicing the "nuts and bolts" helps deal with the complexity.

This is my contract with myself, my agenda if you will for the coming weeks.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) has, for decades, been described in terms of a prototype model which has roots in being called multiple personality disorder. Recent years has seen a realization that dissociation, including more intense dissociation seen in DID or DDNOS, is experienced in a myriad of different ways for different people and at different times.

However, I am not at all convinced that this realization is widely embraced. Clinicians not exposed to many cases of more extreme dissociation or those who try to grasp what dissociation is without prior experience, including those who are newly diagnosed, are often hard pressed to think outside the prototype. While the television series United States of Tara, for example, captures a good deal of what the experience can be of dissociation and switching, it also goes a long way towards reinforcing the well-defined prototype.

I have seen so many, including myself, get caught up in what the DID prototype says we are supposed to be like. That can be a real barrier to healing. It encourages us to deny those experiences that do not fit the prototype and accept those experiences that do fit. That is not to say that we do not have experiences that conform nicely to the prototype. I have seen, and experienced, florid DID which is much like the prototype of Part A knowing nothing about Part B, with self-destructive acting out. DID can really be out of control, but most of the time DID is not like that for most people. And, so, I think it is important to look at all of this from a broader perspective (i.e., that those of us with DID or DDNOS are much more than simply our disorders).

For those of us who experience a wide range of dissociation, we know that the prototype is mostly feature driven and, as such, somewhat superficial. Massive identity shifts are often responses to stress or a trigger. Everyone has reactions to stress and everyone has triggers. With large dissociative walls, our reactions simply tend to be more extreme than most, but they are fundamentally based on the same principles. Complicating matters is that anxiety associated with switching is usually self-perpetuating. Often there is an resulting panic when we realize that we have not been in control of what our body has been doing or have lost time.

In order to heal, our focus needs to become internal and personal. We have to realize that the task is to identify and come to terms with our myriad internal conflicts. When we do that, we are not focusing on the prototype, but rather our own unique experiences and feelings. That is how the barriers can come down, how communication can commence, and how collaborations can ensue. When that happens our experiences become richer. We become more aware. My increased awareness changed everything for me. In many ways it is not even easier, but much harder. I sometimes liked it better when I was not as "co-conscious", when I could just slip away and let someone else take over. Now I am somewhere in between, trying to find my way to a place of healing.

I see DID as a complex network, one that has features of the prototype (parts with rigid barriers), but also has fluidity that allows for barriers to come down and parts to interact in a seamless, dare I say completely normal, way. I have often represented this visually, with parts as circles and lines connecting them. I try to show the reality that the system is not static. That we are not locked into a prototype. That the barriers can come down, but that they can go back up too, and come to some appreciation that DID is really about how we interact with ourselves, no matter how "unconventional" it may seem on the outside.

While DID is unquestionably very challenging, I think it helps to place it in some context. There are far more complex systems on different scales. DID for an individual can be seen as simpler, than say, the community in which you live. Or world governments. Or ecosystems. Or the network of neurons in our brains. Or online social networks. I am constantly trying to reality check my experience of DID with the complexities I know exist in the world. When I am able to do that, my struggles become a bit easier to cope with.

I am not saying that DID is normal. Far from it. But I am saying that when we look at it in a wider context, we make it much easier for us to heal.

In what was the first real post on this blog, a bit over two years ago, I wrote about safety and the healing I had done to that point. How fitting that on the two year anniversary of this blog, I am coming back to safety. Indeed, I posted this month's Carnival activity on safety—which will be published Saturday night. At the time, I did not think it was going to be terribly hard for me. Was I wrong! I had no idea what to submit for my own contribution. The last couple of weeks have been enormously difficult, tumultuous, and confusing. I experienced some instability around the time I posted Hallelujah Piano Cover. But since then, I have experienced massive time warps, huge amounts of lost time, safety concerns, fundamental rifts in awareness and perception, as well as accomplishments that I thought were not possible anymore. The only point in telling this is that life has been too complicated to even contemplate how to capture safety in any way.

But, the ship was righted today. Almost precisely in the same way it was a month ago, except without needing to go into the hospital.

I decided that for my Carnival submission on safety, I would look through my photo galleries and try to collect images that are most safe for me.

There are many pictures of my daughters that show them as safe. Two, for example, taken when each was born, show them swaddled in the hospital blanket with the sock on their heads in the nursery crib. There are hundreds like that. All safe. And while I know I felt a huge sense of safety at the time, the images tell a story that the safety is really on their end. Plus, I did not want to imply that safety is only at infancy (which, of course is not even true for many).

So, I started looking for different images, going through each gallery to see which "spoke" safety to me. I quickly saw pictures of my now-deceased grandparents. Since I was extremely close to them and have often said that I have felt most safe with them, I knew I need to focus my attention there. But as I began gathering images to show, I started having an experience that is evolutionary for me. There are tears. But so much joy and so much awareness of safety.

We always did a lot as a family. There were the customary Sunday dinners, Christmas Eve with Santa Claus every year, our annual family apple picking trip, Papa teaching me how to do yard work and plant flowers, hanging out at Papa's barber shop, and, what I remember most, lots and lots of hugs and kisses.

When I was 22 and my life collapsed, I moved to the family home with my grandparents and parents. I was mentally very sick. I tried to commit suicide, and nearly succeeded twice. And while life was very hard for very long, I always felt a complete sense of safety with them that was unique for me. After a few years and a lot of treatment and effort, my life got much better and more stable. That was around 1994. I met my wife in 1995. Got engaged and bought our first house in 1996. Got married in 1997. Had our first daughter in 1998.

Those years were huge for me and my Nana and Papa. I had hundreds of dinners with them. We talked for hours. We laughed. I took up golfing with my Papa. We bowled together; he would take me to his weekly bowling league for a time. He had a 35mm Minolta camera that he did not know the first thing about. When I got into photography, I started teaching him and he would go with me to the local camera store. I taught him about different films, about lens filters, composition. He attentively listened. He took up art in his 80s; taking painting classes. At the time, I had no interest in making any art myself. I did not realize that now I would incorporate art—as well as photography—as important aspects of my healing.

While I was better, I was still severely partitioned. And while I told them I loved them a million times, I was really not able to have any perspective on it. I was in the moment with them. All the time. I just knew it was love. I just knew it was safe.

But, on the day I got married, I gained perspective on what they meant to me. And this is a memory that I have tried very hard to learn more about, but could not, until tonight.

We got married on a picturesque lake 6 hours by car from where we were living, in the town my wife grew up in. I remember that they were staying in a guest house with all my immediate family, including me. I was there a week before finalizing things with my then-fiance. My family came up a couple days before the wedding. It was all fun and relaxing.

On the night before the wedding, I think it was after the rehearsal dinner, I left them a card and a handwritten letter in their room. This is where things get hazy. I remember I wrote something along the lines of "you saved my life" and also "you taught me what love is." But, aside from that I do not know what I said. And I do not remember their reaction, which was most certainly extremely emotional for all of us.

I think the writing of that letter was a transcendental experience for me. An aligning of sorts. Somehow, I was able to have perfect clarity and perspective on not only how much they meant to me, but also on what getting married to my wife meant in relation to my life history which included them. But after, that perfect perspective went away. We partied at the reception and it just became a party.

When my girls were born, they were a source of my grandparent's happiness. We only lived 30 minutes away and, so, we continued to see them all the time. Life changed for me. It was no longer just me and my Nana and Papa. They died in March 2004 and January 2006 respectively.

Almost exactly two years after my Papa died, my healing journey changed course, and that is what this blog chronicles. My internal and external awareness blossomed like never before. I started using words like healing.

I like to think all these gains are closely connected to my Nana and Papa.

You see, I do not need to know what those words were in the letter I wrote to them when I got married. Because of the process of looking through their pictures, I now know precisely what I was feeling when I wrote it. And it is the feelings that are key.

I am having those feelings right now.

Of love. Of safety.

And that is why when they died, while I cried, I had absolutely no regrets. I told them everything I wanted to tell them. And they gave me everything they needed to give me.

I settled on three images of them. The first is my Papa outside on the patio posing—he was a ham—with my elder daughter. The second is of my Nana outside the hospital as her health was failing a little less than a year before she died. I was trying to cheer her up by taking a picture of her wearing my daughter's hat. She was not a ham like my Papa, but she reluctantly humored me. The third is most meaningful to me. It is a picture of my bedroom now. The chair was one of a pair that my Nana and Papa sat in every night in their own bedroom while watching television together. It is my safe chair. In the background are three paintings my Papa made. It is probably the safest spot on the planet.

That is their gift to me.

In my last post, I wrote about the language of dissociation, specifically focusing on the issue of names in dissociative identity disorder (DID). That discussion leads me to the issue of language while maintaining healthy personal and public boundaries.

Many years ago, I decided that therapy and the hospital would be the places where I would trust and talk freely about all of myself using whatever language and techniques worked best for me. I decided, and a lot of this was a decision driven by instinct, that when I write publicly and interact with people in my life—including most family and friends—I would be extremely careful about the language I chose to use.

I try to write and communicate with others in such a way that it can broadly make sense. I find one important way to destigmatize trauma recovery is to not use language that makes the issue esoteric or unique. I avoid altogether talking publicly, except here and with family, about dissociation. I find it makes me feel safer and less exposed. I have come to terms with the reality that Dissociative Identity Disorder will probably never be something that any significant numbers of people will understand or accept without judgment. It will never be seen like cancer and probably never be seen like depression. It will be so strongly stereotyped because so few have direct contact with it. I have no problem with that.

One of the reasons why I started this blog was that I came out publicly when a child sex abuse scandal in our town came to light. I spoke out in the newspaper and as a parent in the community about the issue and came forward as a survivor myself. I did that to lend some credibility to my argument, saying that we all needed to make sure that we appreciate and attend to the plight of the victims. I am now appreciative of the fact that my coming forward then changed things for me. I was careful about what I said, but it helped me to come out of the darkness and changed the dynamic internally. So it taught me a lesson that I could be effective without telling all the details.

I am mostly comfortable with being able to talk in a public language that sounds mostly "generic," but I do it while knowing inside that the reality is often quite a bit more complicated. Nowadays, I often talk with friends and family about "not being connected" or "feeling depressed." I know it sounds like the stuff of life that everyone has to deal with. Yes, on some level it is. And here, while I do often use a more "technical" language, I still am extremely careful about the words I use and what I share.

But, like everything in life, some people's experiences can be in the extremes. I find that there are safe and not safe—or appropriate and not appropriate—places to talk about these extreme experiences. I do not find it helpful to try to educate everyone in my life about what it is like to have multiple personalities or to self-harm because people are so affected by stereotypes. And here I am careful, for example, not to delve into details about traumatic memories. What I have learned is that stance is not invalidating. Rather it is a personal stance aimed at helping me feel safe. Perhaps it can be seen as my playing it safe. But, even though it is totally different kettle of fish, I would also not talk to a public audience about the intricate mathematical details of the Lennard-Jones potential in molecular modeling (which is what I do for work).

So, I have these boundaries in place and one may wonder if I am only creating an irreconcilable conflict by having such acceptance in therapy and being so careful about how I present myself outside of therapy. I could imagine that someone might think that if I am able to keep my "outside life" appear relatively normal, then am I only creating imaginary issues in therapy? If I just cut out all that uncomfortable stuff from therapy will my life just be so much easier? Is therapy creating my problems?

Those are all valid questions, and all are questions I have asked myself, over and over, in different ways for two decades. To be honest, this has often been a source of internal conflict and I have addressed some of these conflicts here and in my comments on others' blogs, even very recently. In September, I wrote The Uncertainty Principle. In that post, I wrote about the pitfalls associated with definitive answers to complicated issues. I wrote about how many psychiatric "authorities" can see the same person and draw very different conclusions. I wrote that we must challenge ourselves to ask tough questions, struggle with doubt, and find a way to live with friction.

In some ways, how I work in therapy and how I conduct myself publicly is a measure of this necessary friction. But, as I have said before, it is how we use friction that is important. We can let it become an insurmountable barrier and lead us down a path of a false set of beliefs that, on the surface, feels more comfortable. But I have never found denial to be a long-term solution.

Like I said in the last post, I believe when I talk in a specific language about parts of myself openly in therapy, in the hospital, and in my private journal, and am careful about what I say publicly, I find that is actually an approach helps me to heal.