I know I've been here before.

[octobersea.livejournal.com]

And then I go back to this space where I get all determined to shove all of me together like so much Play-Doh. And it seems to work for awhile, and then some little thing will happen.

And I'm back where I am now. Tired of the cycle and experiencing a weekend of truth-facing, whether I like it or not...

Integration. It meant something to me when I started on my journey to integrate, and it means something else entirely now. I don't regret anything. I did manage to regain a lot of memories, focus, and I reduced how many of me there were in a way I think has been a positive thing for me.

Us. Now we can access each other for the most part. We can work as one quite often, and I could't do that before. Incidentally, I did all my integrative work on my own, without a therapist... once I knew what to do and what had to be done, I didn't see the point of paying someone else to sit there and listen about it.

But I'm at this point, this weekend... I feel like I'm lying to myself and it's time to just accept it... this is my life. There are at least three of me I know of right now. Me, the girl writing this right now- I'm KK for short, won't use my real name as it is my legal name and quite unique. Then there's V, and she's in two aspects. She is one who needs to stay caged most of the time, and one who is made of what used to be her and another female named, ironically, Sybil. <-- no it's not because of that damned movie.

Anyway, I'm feeling incredibly alone right now. And how ironic is that. Heh. I decided to rejoin some multiple communities and begin to accept that after ten years of focused effort, if this is where I am, this is okay.

But it's also really upsetting because I feel like I've been lied to to a degree... big surprise.

Anyway... hi. :) Nice to be here... hopefully I will stick around this time. Depends on if everyone in here agrees this time.

Comments

[ridetothesea.livejournal.com]

Hello and welcome. :) Sorry we can't offer any advice or anything.

[octobersea.livejournal.com]

It's nice to be welcomed. :)

[rookguard.livejournal.com]

I hope it doesn't sound ingenuine when i say that we understand your situation exactly. We'll often have days where we wonder if 'we' isn't just a confused 'me' after all, and other days where we wonder how we've ever passed as a singlet at all in the real world. Sometimes we (I, at least) pray to the gods to clear all of us but one out, to integrate us or purge all of us but one. Then, sometimes we can't even bear to think of integration, to destory the thing that defines us so completely. Someone said that its tantamount to mass murder, and I'd be inclined to agree. We are all people, all individuals, and no matter how much trouble our condition gets us into, there's really no justifying our removal of one another just out of inconvenience.

Oh, we'll try. We have fights, really visceral, violent fights, and then we stop when we get tired of it. What does it solve? Nothing. We've spent our entire life trying to understand why we can't stop ourselves from falling into the same patterns of conflict over and over and over again.

Some of us have come to believe that it isn't some theoretical winner of a struggle for supremacy of expression that will come to define us, but that its the conflict itself that is our motivating force and the source of our truest definition. That victories and defeats are just crests and troughs. Knowing this, the conflict continues just as before, but everyone keeps the truth tucked away in the back of their mind in case it needs to be put aside suddenly. We have, to put it more simply, become comfortable with the illusion of competition, as well as the reality of our inevitable equality.

Some of us still refuse to believe we're a 'we'. Sometimes the alienation does begin to get to us. After all, who's ever going to be able to actually understand us when we can't even understand each other?

But you know what it always comes back to? We've got each other, and, if nothing else, we know what we've been through. Lies, truth, we've believed just about everything at one point or another. Reality is ultimately subjective, and, once you realize that, you can just form a mutable working hypothesis of the world and yourselves. It won't always work, it won't always hold together, and sometimes, you're going to have breakdowns and obstacles. But we're still only people, no matter how many people we are. Holding ourselves above the reach of others is probably how we got into this mess in the first place.

We've had hard times, but the things we've learned from it... I wouldn't trade it to be the singlest singlet in the world.

[octobersea.livejournal.com]

It doesn't sound ingenuine. In fact, I'm stunned at how many people are saying things that show how much they get it, and have genuinely experienced it all. I don't know why I'm stunned, since I came here specifically to find others who get it! But I never expect to find anyone who understands... so glad I came back here.

[rookguard.livejournal.com]

believe us, the feeling is mutual.

[octobersea.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :)

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Heh, integration as it's usually practiced sort of reminds me of the "Highlander" movies. "There can only be ONE!!" We went through that deal several times, also on our own and not in therapy, and every time we'd go around for a few months thinking we had finally found or re-formed "the real me," and then the whole business would fall apart on us.

I think... feeling that you've been lied to is understandable. They kind of push a whole story at you; even if you're not in therapy, most of the books and websites repeat it. Integration is the happy ending, the solution to every problem. They make it sound like you'll become some kind of composite super-being with everyone's skills, knowledge and abilities; we thought, for instance, that if there was a main frontrunner who wasn't assertive enough, integration would fix that because this new person would get assertive traits from someone *else* in the system. Unfortunately, it never quite seemed to work that way in practice. For a few months, we might get a "composite person" who could use the skills of various people, but after a while it didn't work any more-- they couldn't do things as well as individual people used to be able to. Billy Milligan and others also reported this experience. They also keep telling you it'll be permanent, so when it isn't, you're supposed to assume that the fault lies with you. It can be very disillusioning when you don't get what you seemed to have been promised.

[octobersea.livejournal.com]

Ok that is exactly what I am talking about.

That feels like relief, that's like... frakkin' a, it's NOT all in my head. SO to speak.