Hi, i'm new here...

[rusted-love.livejournal.com]

Hello.

I guess i should start out by saying i'm 18, female, and very unsure of my multiplicity.

I've read the "positively plural" FAQ, and i don't know if this whole community is opposed to the categorization of DID/MPD or not, but i do consider myself to have DID. For the sake of clarity, i wish not to differentiate between multiplicity and DID, so please just bear with me. I'm not here to argue the basis of a disorder, nor by using the word disorder am i claiming a victum status or "disembracing" any of this.

I've just recently began to seriously consider the fact that i may have DID. It's been in the back of my mind for years now, but through recent therapy, it's come much closer to the front. Parts of me are in great denial that i have DID, and other parts are beginning to accept and embrace this. I don't know what to think, because this is all so new and i don't feel that i have a way of communicating with my inner parts. Through therapy, i was able to communicate with a little girl in me, giving her a "safe place" to go to, and i believe she surfaced in the session. But this is my problem... i can never be sure of a "switch", and can never be sure of my own identity... i don't know who the "real/original" me is, or any of us for that matter. In short, i don't know who i am, or who anybody in me is. I guess i hear voices, although i've just recently been able to admit this, because my whole life i've thought it was normal. But when i have dialogues going on in my head, i don't know who is who, and whenever i try to communicate with different parts i don't really get anything back. In other words, i'll talk to them, but i can't get them to talk back, although they do make short responses when i'm not trying to directly communicate with them, and i'm just trying to think my own thoughts. For instance, i'll be driving down the road, going through what i'd call monologues in my head, when someone else will pipe in with their opinion. But i don't know who that person is, and i can't establish a real conversation, just little statements here and there.

Do any of you have suggestions on how to further communicate with those inside of me? I'd love to get to know them, but i have the feeling they'd rather me not.

This is all very confusing to me, and i hope that someone here can relate to this, even though what i have describes is far from articulate. I just want a way to get to know the others inside me, and i don't know how to do that. I also want to know who i am, because even as i type this, i don't know if i'm an alter or "the real thing". I do know that when i typed in i'm 18, it felt wrong... like i'm somehwhat younger. But i don't know if this is a younger part of me, or if i'm just a normal teenager feeling insecure about my maturity.

Sometimes i wish there was an instruction manual to being a multiple, and then the denial part of me comes in and says i wouldn't even *have* these questions if i were truly a multiple. What do you all think?

I think i had a few more quesitons about this, but they've slipped my mind for the time being, and i fear this post has been long enough already. I hope to get some responses, and thank you all so much for taking time to read this.

- Katelyn, or whoever this may be.

Comments

[ex-kiota.livejournal.com]

It doesn't really matter if you're 'truly' a multipule or not. You'll find that out with time. I'm not sure about my multiplicity either.

Try just inviting your personas. Finding a quiet place in your head, and issuing a general invitation to everyone. If someone shows up, start talking in a non-threatening manner... not immediately asking questions about who they are. You'll get to know them slowly that way. If no one comes, just talk to yourself, and maybe some will venture out as you do.

[20splinters.livejournal.com]

Hi, welcome to the community.

I’m well used to always having voices in my head, but it’s only since we all became aware that all of them have names (and even now, people can still make comments without identifying themselves). AS for getting in touch with them, if they really don’t want to communicate with you, it’s going to be very hard to reach them. But, one thing we sometimes do is drop down into a very relaxed semi-tranced state and it gets easier to hear the internal voices. I’m not quite sure how to explain how to do this, but a place without a lot of noise or distraction helps a lot. We don’t want other people to hypnotize us and don’t know how you feel about that, but possibly your therapist would be willing to discuss some self-hypnosis techniques for you to use on your own time.

As far as denial goes, when we were all first adjusting to being a fully aware multiple system, the way we always identified Jocelyn, our formerly unaware face person, was that she would instantly start questioning whether or not she was multiple and start denying it. I toy with denial myself from time to time, and find myself thinking, “Maybe we’re all just figments of each other’s imaginations,” but if you reread that, there it all is: “Figments of each other’s imaginations.”

Good luck and stay in touch!

~ Anakin

[pengke.livejournal.com]

You have to tread carefully if the main reason you think you're multiple is because a therapist says you have DID. It can put you under a lot of pressure to conform to his beliefs. The fact that you have no communication and can't figure out if you're you or someone else means you're at risk for fabricating people that aren't there. It would be too easy for you to start thinking every change in emotion or change in mood is a different person.

Whether you're really multiple or not, none of us can tell you. Lots of singles hear voices so only you can tell whether your voices are real people or just you talking to yourself. It doesn’t sound as though any of this is causing problems in your life so your therapist is wasting your time when he focuses on this instead of the reasons you sought treatment in the first place.

As for communication, the problem might be with you. You’re wavering between embracing being multiple and completely denying it. It would make sense that as part of the denial you’d refuse to let yourself hear any of the direct responses to you from the voices. You should keep trying to talk to them. Writing in paper journals can be helpful. You could write letters to each other. You could also tape record the therapy sessions where the main topic is DID and listen to them later to see if you learn anything.

Thanks, all.

[rusted-love.livejournal.com]

i completely agree with your first paragraph... it sounds exactly like something i would say... which is the "denial" part of me, thinking i'm just "playing along" with the therapist or whatnot. But today i'm not so much in that whole denial mood, and i do know for sure all of this isn't because of my therapist's implications; he worked with/ brought out one of my alter's before he even mentioned that i might have DID; in fact, he merely agreed with me when *i* brought it up, and at first when i proposed doubts, even said the voices could be caused by other dissociative disorders, also; so he never really "pushed" this diagnosis on me, it's more like we came to an agreement.

As far as this causing any problems in my life, you're right, it's not; but i do think it's very important to be brought up in therapy. Our main objective is to gain trust of the little one so that i may remember my repressed memories, which *are* causing a big problem in my life right now. Without adressing my DID or alters, i don't think i'll ever get those memories back, and therefore can never move on from what happened.

Thank you for the suggestion that the problem might be that i might be "refusing" to hear the responses from the voices... i hadn't considered that, even though it seems fairly obvious.

And thank you to everyone else for your suggestions... i will try any and all of them; and i sincerely appreciate the fact that you spent time to read my queries and respond wholeheartedly to them.

-rusted_love

Re: Thanks, all.

[aodhfionn.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this will help or add more confusion, but here's something in the Multiple Wiki about how multiple's memory can differ from that of singlets.
Time and Plausible Deniability (http://www.kinhost.org/wiki/Crisses/TimeAndPlausibleDeniability)

However, you might not be... err... full-blown multiple. Even if you are, that's not to say that everyone inside is a fully developed person.

We have a port town just over the mountains from our sanctuary in our internal landscape. It has about a thousand people in it, and when I first found it, I was a little freaked out. However, reading what others have said here and elsewhere has lead me to two possibilities, either of which might work for our situation. The townsfolk might not be fully developed people, or they might not actually be in our head, instead being part of another world. I don't know, yet.

a way

[darkheart1.livejournal.com]

Get a notebook if the above suggestions dont work, invite anyone and eveyrone to keep log in it, tell them that it is just for them and no one else will read it. Start out by the first post in it saying, who you are, what you told us, invite anyone who fronts to write what they do while here and make sure to add to your post that they should sign it with their names. Thats how I kinda figured out what was "wrong" with me when there were no other answers for me.

Tracy

Re: a way

[effeteifrit.livejournal.com]

good idea...

Re: a way

[darkheart1.livejournal.com]

Let me know if it works by the way

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

I'd say that even the vaguest sense that there are others is an indication that there are, in fact, others.

Personally I wouldn't trust a therapist to bring them out. It could be that they don't care to have you know them better because you'd run and tell your shrink. I would concur with what pengke says in this regard.

Having DID and being multiple are indeed two different things, although the mental health people will try to convince you they're the same. I can see that I'd better read the new PP FAQ: it's been quite a while since we had anything to do with that forum.

The way I'm reading this, you're not certain whether these are persons sharing your space, or parts of your own mind that you merely imagine are distinct persons.

You may not have an original person or a so-called real you -- I think this can be true even for people who have split their one consciousness to become multiple, rather than being a group of independent minds such as we or pengke or sethrenn are. The idea of an original personality is suspect in brain/mind studies... there's no evidence that such a thing exists. Personality, overall, is a social construct, whether you're singlet or plural.

Lack of communication is certainly no sign that you're not multiple. Neither is wishing for an instruction manual. I wish we'd been encultured in a society that accepted multiplicity as normal and gave permission for it.

As for the communication difficulties, keep trying. At least you receive short responses! That's a great deal more than many people have. Good luck.

[aodhfionn.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the "Multiplicity: The Missing Manual (http://www.kinhost.org/wiki/Main/MultiplicityTMM)" wiki?

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Yes, Jay and Elaq contribute to it. Jay also contributes to Wikipedia.

[forever-alone.livejournal.com]

This sounds very similar to the time when our previous frontrunner was struggling with being multiple... minus the therapy, that came later. Denial/doubt issues can be very tough to deal with, especially for those in a system who are being doubted.

I, too, suggest getting a notebook for communication purposes. Also keep trying to communicate internally. If they want to talk, they will. If not, they won't. One important thing to remember is that if you are indeed multiple, then all the members of your system are people, and they're going to act like people do. That includes you. It doesn't really matter if you're an "alter" or "the real thing", you're all still people.

Forgive me if I'm coming off a bit rude, I just woke up and I've not had my morning caffeine as of yet. In the end, only you can truly know if you're multiple, median or singlet. It just may take some time and information to figure that out.

-V, feeling very inarticulate

[qilora.livejournal.com]

as for us folks: (begin playing song to the "Patty Duke show")... "we're cousins! identicial cousins! :-) we laugh alike and walk alike at times we even talk alike!" ;-)

one of the biggest problems we had, with realising that we were plural, is the fact that we feel like a group of identical quint's at times!.. our fronting system is only about 4 or 5 folks (much of the time), and so much about us is similar... we also like to co-front (i can't remember the last time there was only one of us up front at a time)..
so as far as "switching" goes (in the clinical definition of the word), it just doesn't apply in our case...

if we have a room with 3 friends sitting there, and another friend walks in, and just hangs out for a few minutes (silent), and then one of us leaves the room... putting the total back at "3 people in the room"... could you really say that the person who *left* the room had "switched into" the person who had walked into the room a short time before?

it just doesn't really apply to much in our case....

the closest we get, is who might happen to borrow the vocal chords for a few mins, to say something in particular... but that does not mean that he or she is the only one there up front...
and the same goes if one of us decides to get up and walk the body for us (to go get that glass of water, or go to the bathroom), it doesn't mean no one else is there, maybe the rest of us are just feeling to lazy to do it ourselves ;-)

as far as DID goes, we are lucky enough to have escaped any sort of diagnosis by therapists as far as our plurality is concerned... we are really uneducated as far as what the criteria for labelling someone "DID" might be...

we would only arge, from our biased stance on this subject, that you make a point to connect with functional-plurals online, and decide for yourself(s) if this (MPD or DID) is something you find to be true in your own life...


Sometimes i wish there was an instruction manual to being a multiple, and then the denial part of me comes in and says i wouldn't even *have* these questions if i were truly a multiple. What do you all think?

personally, we have a harder time believing folks who say things like "i *never* questioned any part of my life/beliefs/identity(s)".... i think its just normal, to stop every now and then and ask ourselves "what the hell am i anyway?"... who said it? "The unexamined life, is not worth living"... one of them old philosopher dudes ;-)

Julie, Jules & Co.

[aodhfionn.livejournal.com]

There were long stretches when we would switch back and forth without being fully aware of who was front. Sometimes, we still do.

Typically, it has to do with comfort and safety. If we don't want the people we're around to know what's going on and who's front, it's just easier if we don't tell ourselves until it's over.

That can cause... Um, identity overload, I guess... While we try to figure out who said what and why so that we can figure out what to deal with and how.

[saturniakitty.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder the same thing, if I'm the orginal person, or who I am really. But I think I've come to the conclusion that it really doesn't matter - I know I am *someone*, and I'm here in this body *now*, and so what difference would it make if I was here first? It took a while to accept this way of thinking though!

Just a post...

[effeteifrit.livejournal.com]

Just a post to say that I can empathize with you; I seem to be in a similar position. Or at least someone in the system is in a similar position. There's at least one who accepts that the system is multiple because he's not usually out; therefore his very existence indicates that something is up.

The place I'm in is that I don't seem to (usually) know which "I" I am at any given time, and I don't have much control over who's out when. The one who recognizes our multiplicity has taken up the job of writing down for us what is going on internally, since there is some fear about openly communicating with others inside (partially due to fear that they aren't from the Self), and some just aren't in the position to want to or be capable of writing on the internet.

Anyway...

[iamshadow.livejournal.com]

We're kind of not single not multiple, and have settled for the moment on the short label of median.
Have you been to The Vickis Website? (http://www.asarian.org/~vickis/index.html) It's got information about and for median/midcontinuum identifying systems, and stories from different systems talking about their experiences. That may better define what you're feeling than simply 'multiple' or 'singlet'. Check it out, anyway.