(no subject)

[artichokes.livejournal.com]

Since I totally made a seemingly-hypocritical moron out of myself in a previous post, I'd like to express my interest in your experiences with professionals to whom you sought some form of assistance. What was helpful for you? What was completely wrong? Were the professionals involved knowingly disregarding your multiplicity - did any successfully diagnose it? Were you open about your multiplicity from the very beginning, or did you let on later? Were you seeking help for system-related maladies, or for other things? What treatments were involved for such things? What problems were had, and how were they worked out, or worsened? Also, has anyone heard of EMDR for trauma-related issues?

I guess I'll start out by saying my boyfriend and his system was at first diagnosed as schizorphenic when their body was very young, perhaps 8 years old or so. Nowadays, for one psychologist, it was more of an issue that "April" (the name of the body) was in a homosexual relationship (when really it was Andrew and me together) than that (s)he'd been raped of her childhood. So homophobia got in the way of the real problems at hand, and nothing was accomplished.

I really hope I didn't ruin my rep' as a "nice singleton" around here...

Comments

[khlara.livejournal.com]

I had been begging my parents to see a psych if only because I felt there was something inheirtly wrong with me. A teacher in high school refused to have me in class unless I saw someone. So I did. He put me on Risperdal, an anti-psychotic, because I asked him to, but otherwise said I was just overly dramatic. Until he find out I with-held my own background info from him. So I was let go.
The 2nd psych I saw because of repitive suicide threats. After I told her about Zoe (our system doesn't talk about Zoe) and the rest of us, she said we were Multiple, she didn't deal with "our type" and referred us to someone who did.
3rd psych said she treated all her patients like the movie 3 faces of Eve (never saw it) and refused to diagnose us. I try and don't remember much of the treatment now, but it pretty much made us a singlet (integrated us). So we did fine, except having to deal with everyone's tic's at once. So this past fall we broke again to deal with a) all of us and b) the new stress that was hitting the body (because this "singlet" personality was going to die if we didn't)
We were basically assigned meditation 6 times a day to integrate us (which we didn't do. We're not good at the meditation thing) and...I think that was it. Other than talking.
Gee, I hope that answered your question.
~ unknown (possibly Wendy?)
Collections Gang

wtf

[fairybluebird.livejournal.com]

any particular kind of meditation?
i'm really glad you shared that because i always wonder how different people think... like what they DO to integrate people. i mean, even aside from the fact that a lot of people seem to have a different idea of what that is.

i can't imagine that just meditating normally six times a day would do anything other than either (a) drive us CRAZY or (b) calm us down a lot. What did it actually do??

I saw the end of 3 faces of Eve... it was kind of cool but then in the end two of people in the system just, like, spontaneously die and then the third person is all happy and normal and everything is solved. But at least the therapist was SAD that they died. I think the book is different. I think I saw some scenes where the therapist helped them go back and recover repressed memories somehow and where he tried to help them negotiate conflicts that they had, but I didn't see much.

Were you ritually abused, that you know of? If that's too personal, obviously you don't have to answer - it's just that your usericon reminds me a lot of a graphic that someone I know was totally obsessed with, and it was connected to their abuse. weird, huh?

Re: wtf

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Three faces of Eve was a complete fake. There was really a woman that it was based on, Chris Costner-Sizemore, but what happened to her was nothing like what the authors of that book said. She wrote her own books, I'm Eve, and A Mind Of My Own.

The authors of Three Faces of Eve lifted most of their material from a work of fiction by Shirley Jackson, Birds' Nest. Jackson based her novel on the work of Dr. Morton Prince plus interviews with a psychologist who taught at the local university. She tried to be realistic, but didn't succeed, particularly with the ending.

I believe khlara's graphic is a sigil having to do with their involvement in the Virtual Adepts game... it always reminds me of something adapted from Kabalistic magick, which is not satanic.

Re: wtf

[khlara.livejournal.com]

It was a type of thing where I was supposed to relax my body, but imagine a tiny person going throughout my body and relaxing each part, and then when I got to my head, have that person look out through the window. We did the meditation maybe all of twice when actually see the psychatrist only because...well, we don't have time to meditate. I don't know if it did anything. It was kind of neat, felt more like opening up our third eye, but overall didn't really do anything. I think we integrated because she treated us like a singlet where everyone else we know treats us as a multiple. They don't call us by individual name, just the body name, but I think people unconsciously picked up on the fact that each member in the system is good at a different thing.

Our memory is very good. We never forget anything, and no we weren't abused.
The user icon is is actually a symbol from White Wolf's Mage the Ascension role play game. It's the Virtual Adept symbol. We currently use it for our system's icon only because we can't find anything else that we feel represents us (not that the icon represents us either, but it was in our icon list and we just decided to)
So I do find it rather weird, unique and odd that it was used for ritual abuse. I really can't imagine how.

Re: wtf

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Well she didn't say it was used for ritual abuse, she said it looked a lot like one that was. It's a geometric design based on circles and triangles and that could describe any one of hundreds of actual occult sigils as well as ones that are just made up for games. Chances are the one her friend was "totally obsessed" with was the standard old inverted-pentagram-in-a-couple-of-concentric-circles.

[idianshire.livejournal.com]

hi

I've never been in therapy for multiplicity. All my therapy has been related to abuse issues. Since we came out of the multiple closet our multiplicity has been addressed in as such as the therapists we have worked with have had to be able to acknowledge and work with us as individuals, because it is the individuals that are dealing with the abuse. When we got our last therapist we basically said, we're multiple, if you can't treat us as individuals and work with us that way there is no point continuing. Perhaps because there has never really been the hype that used to accompany multiplicity where I live there hasn't been any "multiple therapy".

I have never been offically diagnosed as multiple, aside from self-diagnosis. But according to some people that means I can't really know I am multiple (yeah bitterness, not going to get into that here). I have had bad experiences, but mostly that is just bad experiences in general, not specifically about multiplicity. It seems my experiences in life challenge a lot of people's view of the world, not just the multiplicity, but my lifestyle choices, and the abuse we endured. And from experience when professionals feel challenged they often take that as a threat and come out on the offensive.

As for EMDR I have heard wonderful things about it, but my own expereince with it was one of trauma. It was extremely harmful for us and caused some major fallout. Of course the therapist we had at the time said that was becasue we were resisting recovery. But she was a total bitch and incredibly harmful.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

We know very well from our experience working for a variety of mental health professionals that some of them are really dedicated and see the health in their clients, not the sickness. They believe they're not different from their clients, they don't set themselves apart. They believe the clients heal themselves and the dr. is just there to provide moral support and listen. They learn from their clients, and the best ones admit it. Because they resist pushing pills for the least little things but instead believe in insight-oriented therapy, they may be on their way out like the dinosaur.

As far as I know, EMDR is a treatment cult like the recovery movement... it has a number of diehard true believers and an equal number of people who regard it as a quick fix that doesn't solve problems long term. We had a friend who was put through one EMDR session and came close to having a nervous breakdown. Visualizing the traumatic event repeatedly, over and over, being asked to relive it, while flipping one's eyes back and forth faster and faster, does not seem to be conducive to much of anything. I think the scientific jury is still out on whether or not it has any real or lasting effect http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/emdr.html

it may depend on what people think emdr is supposed to do

[fairybluebird.livejournal.com]

It doesn't have to be the eyes; it can be squeezing with alternate hands, or our current therapist has some kind of machine that I think is supposed to deliver pulses to alternate hands.

We went through it once (the eye kind) with our last therapist, and it was actually about the only thing she did at any point that had any real result. she was kind of a fuckup. The funny thing was that I was supposedly trying EMDR to deal with my fear of this really abusive woman in my life, but I ended up going inside and finding that this really quiet kid in our system had locked herself away, and coaxing her out with some guidance from the therapist. And it had a HUGE effect for the kid; she was totally freed in a lot of ways (through being convinced to try trust and exploring things instead of locking away and hiding) and became a big catalyst for change and recovery for us. So not really its intended effect!

I think for us it worked a lot in the way that hypnotherapy would; that is, as a way to keep our conscious mind out of it and let us just go into our feelings and our gut experiences and do what we needed to do with them. (that's hypnotherapy as we were taught about it in a drama class in highschool, as basically a relaxation technique.) We want to try it again, but there's a money problem with therapy right now....

[idianshire.livejournal.com]

I can't work out how to do the direct quote thing...

Anyway, we are working with a pysch nurse, mostly on issues with our post trauma disorder and anxiety. He knew nothing about multiplicity when he started working with us. He actually thought I had some extremely strange form of depersonalisation the first time he ever met me (long before he started working with us on a one-to-one basis). This isn't to say he or I think my multiplicity is dissociative identity disorder, he, without even been that aware of multiplicity in any form, was just trying to pinpoint what he was observing. This is all complicated by the fact a lot of us do have dissociative disorders attached to our ptsd, in particular derealisation. Anyway I am getting side tracked.

When we did our usual spiel.. "we're multiple, accept and work with that or goodbye it's been nice to meet you" he wanted to learn more. We did our best to educate him on what multiplicity was like for -us-. He was always very good at keeping the balance of that, of us educating him and him being there as someone to listen and support us. On his own he went and did a lot of research himself. The good thing, and probably the point of this post is his belief structure around multiplicity. His view is there is multiplicity and then there is Dissociative Identity Disorder. Multiplicity, to him, being different people residing in, or using a body to interact with this world and DID being dissociated aspects of one person. He gets that we are individuals, he personally sees integration for multiplicity as a "crook of shit like most of the writings on the subject", and actually seems to understand and totally except our gateway type of multiplicity.

He's an exceptional guy actually, in both his professional and personal life. Someone we have grown to have a lot of respect in. The good thing about all this too, at least for us, is that he is also highly respected in his field and does a lot of education, both with professionals and the community about the working with, respecting and accepting those with mental illness. He has campaigned strongly for the rights of clients. So yeah, although we have had some really bad experiences we have also had experience of some exceptional professionals who have gained our utmost respect.

~Victress

[tigrin.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if my experience is of any interest, as I'm technically not multiple, but I figure it's worth sharing...

Sometime around October 2003, I think, I was rather desperately looking for some kinda clinical help, since I was suspicious I had multiple personalities and wanted a professional opinion. I searched through Sidran to find a "dissociative specialist" in my area, and my mother reluctantly agreed to take me and pay for it. I was 16 at the time.

Unfortunately I didn't set up the appointment, so my mother told the psychologist her perspective of the whole thing right away. I'm not sure either ever took me very seriously. I told the psychologist about my experiences, my characters, etc. She never really told me anything about what she thought was going on with me, except that I was highly hypnotizable, and dissociative. She told me that what I was experiencing as separate personalities was actually a result of my inability to cope with my own emotions. The subject was largely dropped earlier last year and I've continued to see her about every other week, sometimes once a month.

Maybe she was right, but I never really dropped it, myself... since I have a terrible fear of confrontation, I've never been able to ask her more about it. I've been left to do a lot of my own therapy, figuring out what's going on... I've tentatively concluded that I have soulbonds, and I might have mentioned that to her once, but it was a rather dismissed topic (if multiplicity isn't taken seriously, then soulbonding definitely isn't). I don't feel at all comfortable talking about them anymore. Every time one of them gets brought up somehow, she probes and twists at my perception, trying to force what I associate with them back into me. I've pretty much left them out of it altogether, which is difficult, as they were the reason I came and still a big part of whatever we talk about... I find myself dodging any mention or trying to explain it in a "singlet" way, as if I were just a really, really confused person with strong, simultaneous emotional responses and limitations.

I keep hoping to stop going, somehow... I don't feel as if we've gotten anywhere... I feel manipulated... it hasn't been the best experience, for sure.

not sure if that was waht you were looking for, though.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the party line DID concept as found at the ISSD's treatment guidelines (http://www.issd.org/indexpage/isdguide.htm). Therapists who believe multiplicity is a dissociative disorder are likely to follow this line of thought now. To them, the disorder is your belief that these people are actual persons. They're all you, you just can't handle your emotions, highly hypnotizable, etc. How well you presented yourself or your people would have made no difference.

If you feel it is a waste of your time and money, why don't you stop going? What kind of help do you need?

[tigrin.livejournal.com]

Ah... that seems to be her belief.

I'm only still going because I'm not quite sure how to get out of it. I just don't know how to confront my therapist about it. I know that once I stop going I'll probably never want to start again... which is actually kind of fine with me. My friends provide a whole lot more support than I get from therapy, and I'm working my way to figuring stuff out on my own. It's not as if I haven't gotten anything out of going - it was worth it sometimes just to have an objective listener - but... most of the time I come out worse than I go in, now. and I don't quite agree with her approach, especially since it usually leaves me feeling like an idiot.

that's how i felt about things

[fairybluebird.livejournal.com]

after my last therapist!

she was totally fine with multiple stuff but she was SO useless. Basically anything I got out of it was just from having a theoretically objective listener, although like yours i don't think she was always that objective. She tried to "fix" me a lot of the time -- which was very frustrating when I was just trying to tell her about something, or talk something out, and then she would start in suggesting things. I was like, you know, I know what I want to do already, I'm just letting you know what's going on with me... but I wasn't in a place where I could say that to her then.

I feel really really lucky because I ended up finding 12-step programs and I got, like, the benefits of being able to talk about things to people who understood and could be objective, without the $60 price tag or her manipulation or "fixing" or me trying to educate her or any of that. I actually fucking LEARN something, now.

Re: that's how i felt about things

[tigrin.livejournal.com]

What bothers me is that she -knows- I'm highly suggestable... so she makes a LOT of suggestions... you should do this, you should try that... and even if I really don't want to, I end up doing it, eventually. What she suggests doesn't always help, either.

believe me when I say that this is costing my mother a LOT more than $60 a visit... insurance doesn't cover any of it, unfortunately. it's in the $200s an hour. another reason it bothers me to keep going...

Re: that's how i felt about things

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

she was totally fine with multiple stuff but she was SO useless. Basically anything I got out of it was just from having a theoretically objective listener, although like yours i don't think she was always that objective.

That could be a good description of the last one we went to. ^_^; She was perfectly calm with us switching in therapy and all, but she really didn't do much, most of the time, except for sitting around while we talked things out. I know that some people get something out of that therapy approach, where the patient is just basically encouraged to talk to themselves, but it was kind of counterproductive for us-- made us really self-conscious.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

So you're paying somebody else money to make you feel worse than when you went in and feel like an idiot? You know you do not have to confront her about anything -- just stop going. You could also just stop going and then write her a letter about how you felt about her so called treatment. Why waste your money if it is hurting you so much?

[squnq.livejournal.com]

I got forced into therapy after a suicide attempt. My experiences with therapy haven't been pleasent - bouncing around from one to another who prescribed me drugs and tranquilizers which did little but make me feel worse. I finally got a therapist that diagnosed me with DID (wheither that's correct or not in my instance) who attempted to integrate us through talk therapy and regression, but it didn't work on all of my peers, and when the therapist passed away, I chose to continue on my own.

I still get bouts of depression and anxiety, and occasional "flashback" style episodes, but they're somewhat uncommon so I've been able to deal with it on my own. I don't try to re-integrate anymore, either, I operate under the assumption that if I'm "disordered" that the disorder will eventually repair itself over time, and that if the others are truly individuals, that integration wouldn't be ethical unless it's what they want.

[shandra.livejournal.com]

We first went into therapy for issues related to sexual abuse and to a rape. Our first therapist didn't suspect multiplicity, but she gave whoever went good grounding techniques and some of the standard feminist fare around power in relationships and so on.

About 7 years after that we were having some issues that I would characterize as the change between being non-selves-aware and just accepting certain oddities in life (like owning other people's clothing and only remembering certain hours of the day :)) and moving to selves-awareness. We saw a therapist that was really an idiot in so many ways. The person who largely went to therapy at that time, Teresa, ignored a lot of the warning signs that he was an idiot, until he did something really stupid and she quit. He definitely did not believe in multiplicity and reassured her that she wasn't multiple, but it had little effect on us overall because it was clearly untrue.

Our current therapist is excellent at issues related to trauma, and accepts multiplicity as unusual and having its own challenges but not being anything to cure or deny. She treats everyone who speaks with her with the same degree of respect as she would if everyone had a separate body, and is excellent at helping us hone our communication skills. She reminds us to respect each other the odd time that we need it, and delivers different therapy to each person differently 'cause we have different needs.

So. :-)

We've heard of EMDR but my own belief is that if one is recovering memories (we do; at least we share them amongst ourselves and call that recovering) it's really NOT a good idea to interrupt the natural process of communication. I sort of liken it to a family where people are tentatively sharing their harsh experiences, and then you strap someone down and force something completely out of the blue.

In a healthy & respectful process, I think people share tough shit when it's not going to unbalance everyone. _If_ it works (and I have heard arguments on both sides) I think EMDR bypasses that natural sense of timing and can push a system into crisis. So I'm not a big fan of it.

[forever-alone.livejournal.com]

Our previous frontrunner was forced into therapy a few years back, but she never brought up issues about multiplicity. She was in denial and also feared bringing up the fact that she heard voices and such. She was never even told if she had any sort of diagnosis, and was basically offered no help outside of "stop cutting and deal with your anxiety and you'll be fine". She lied her way out of therapy after that point.

An ex of mine tried EMDR and apparently had positive results, but I don't know any details.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

While I can write that Middle Earth is not real, I cannot actually think it as I write it, least I upset the system. (God forbid.)

Tolkien didn't mean for Middle-Earth to be a separate world-- it's actually supposed to be our own Earth, in a mythical prehistory (he started it with the intent of creating a new mythology for England). In that sense anyway you can say it's real, or as much so as you consider earthworld to be (some people in here are occasionally dubious of its actual reality ^_~).

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

The first time we were sent to a therapist, we were six-- we were considered to have 'problematic behavior' at school and at home. Part of the 'problematic' behavior at school was directly related to our form of autism (Asperger's)-- inability to judge normal social standards, etc, in ways that apparently led others to see us as more disturbed than we actually were. I'm also quite convinced that most of the adults around us believed we were 'having trouble telling fantasy from reality' because, among other things, we insisted on being called by different names.

We got sent to counselors several times in the years that followed, mostly because other kids at school wouldn't leave us alone and this was apparently considered symptomatic of a problem with us, not with them. I do recall that we were very careful and calculated in our presentations with them, never saying or doing anything that would make us look too 'abnormal.'

The first time we started seeing a therapist seriously was in high school, for depression (family didn't notice for the most part, but one of our teachers did and actually recommended this woman). This was during the time when we were first starting to seriously consider that we might be multiple, and we suggested to her at one point that 'I'm sort of several different people.' She dealt with it by taking the approach that 'they represent aspects of you,' but she didn't tell us to get rid of the others or that we were delusional or psychotic. I suspect that she may have actually seen that we were plural, but it was also the mid-90s when lawsuits against therapists were starting to become big news, and I think she feared being sued by our family if she 'encouraged' us to be multiple. The long and short of it was that we generally ended up interacting with her as a single person, though she definitely was insightful and helped us out in other ways. Actually, her example is one of the reasons we've always had faith that there are therapists who are genuinely good, compassionate people and not just clueless or running on power trips.

The other therapist we've seen on any kind of long-term basis was a few years ago. We basically came to the conclusion that a therapist wouldn't be able to really work with us effectively unless they knew about our multiplicity-- otherwise, they'd be missing half the picture. It was a university clinic, and they generally assigned patients to interns, who were required to disclose everything said in the sessions to their supervisors. Upon finding out about our existence, the supervisor panicked a bit and promptly ordered for us to be sent along to another doctor in the clinic (non-intern) who 'specializes in working with people like you.' I can only figure that we were assumed to be so fucked-up, solely on the basis of our multiplicity, that a mere intern wasn't capable of handling us, but the clinic (for all that it was good in many other ways) seems to have absolutely no records concerning the transfer of our case or the reasons behind it.

Anyway, the 'specialist' wasn't too bad. She did not try to integrate us, call us psychotic, or insist that 'you must work through all your trauma.' She agreed that we should be able to set the goals of therapy for ourselves, and if we wanted to deal primarily with issues unrelated to our multiplicity per se, that was fine. The problem was that, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, she had a habit of letting us talk to ourselves during sessions more often than she actively offered advice-- so we got a few things worked out, but not as many as we would've liked to. We've kind of hit a point, though, where I don't think therapists, however good and well-meaning, can help us much with the remaining issues we do have-- we have to work the rest of it out on our own.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

...one more thing concerning our experiences with different therapy approaches: We've also had some experience with psychiatric medications and find that, generally speaking, we do well with small doses of anti-anxiety meds, and under very specific circumstances with certain types of antidepressants. All the meds we've ever taken have affected our communication in one way or another, though-- in every case (except for one anti-anxiety) for the worse, which is part of why we see them as short-term solutions only. (Interestingly, conversely, we found that psychedelic drugs seem to improve our communication-- though this seems to be more common than generally acknowledged.)

[beyli.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity what sort of psychedelics should I look into if I want to go this route? I have little xprience in the area.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

The easiest and still legal way to explore psychedelic experience is DXM. Plain old Delsym cough syrup.
Start here http://www.dextromethorphan.ws/dxmguide.htm
and here http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dxm/faq/

(Erowid is a great site to learn about all psychotropic drugs, legal and not. Very scholarly.)

Some people feel better about using mushrooms because they are natural and seem to have a smoother effect. http://www.shroomery.org/

Some people have very good luck with ordinary pot and we have one friend& who swear by legal highs.

What to listen to while tripping: http://www.hos.com

Naturally, don't drive while on this stuff, etc., etc., usual disclaimers apply and Your Mileage May Vary as always.