Guides, Guardians, Spirits, Angels, Parts Of Me, Fictional Creations, All Of The Above...

[brightlotusmoon]

Especially for naamah_darling

Here is a post for questions about my Healthy Multiplicity, and the three (now potentially four) female people/entities who inhabit my brain and help me cope with all my various vast disabilities and illnesses.
This is also a post for others to discuss their own.

-Serena: The first known guide, who guides me through all and every pain, tension, emotion, and fear, who is my inner nurse.
-Alicia: The second known guide, who guides me through epilepsy and postictal states, who is my inner mage.
-Amara: The mysterious third guide with me from birth, only recently human, who guides me through overall brain damages, memory problems, cracks in the walls, neuronal crumbling.
-Amber: the previously silent, hidden fourth guide who acts as a preserver of my sanity, who seems to catch me when I fall so deeply I fear entrapment, who deflects darker energies and turns negative into positive.

Disclaimer: This is not a case of DID, which is a very, very specific disorder. My girls do not leave my mind to use my body and voice, although there have been very rare postictal states in which Serena has spoken through me when I was fully incapacitated; however, I was still myself, just unable to articulate until she lent her voice.
Healthy Multiplicity is extremely common in perfectly healthy people. It is often seen as a form of coping mechanism for many disabled people, who need to sometimes retreat into their creative minds to preserve themselves, to soothe their mental conditions, to know that they are able and capable and strong. Because sometimes, being reassured by loved ones falls hollow, and you know your own mind well enough, and your own mind knows you well enough.

Comments

[oneonthefence.livejournal.com]

Part II, because no worries, I can't shut the fuck up ever.

It was very scary and VERY odd to 1)see these personalities the way other people must (since a few have been recorded - my husband has recorded events a few times, and we have pictures. I am actually Shilo in my user pic, so that's ME, but not me as ME), and 2)live in a trauma unit where 20 people from all over the country have DID and C-PTSD. A lot of awful shit went down, and it was triggering. But good came out of it, too. I'm still not completely co-conscious, but at least I understand the hows and whys pretty well. The worst parts were always when a personality would come out, not understand where he or she was, and would lash out. Then I/we'd be sedated and thrown in a padded room. Not a good way to wake up in the morning...

And it's okay if it's fascinating. It sometimes fascinates me, because I GET it, but it's still so - new. This has been my whole life, but piecing it together is a really interesting project. It's an outline of my life - but not my life. I'm 31 now, and have technically had DID since I was 2 (despite the diagnosis at 23 - for years and years, I was thought to have bipolar II or schizophrenia, but then, a doctor actually did his job - imagine - and everything started to add up), so I have a lot to try to put together.

It does seem like DID stems from trauma and illness and so forth (as I mentioned, I was brutally raped - by my birth father as a child, and then several times by different men as a teenager. I was also beaten, neglected, emotionally manipulated, and gaslighted), but Healthy Multiplicity is a good strategy and isn't an illness, per se. I mean, I wouldn't wish DID on my worst enemy (okay, maybe on a few people, ha...), but multiplicity seems like a "good" way to cope. It doesn't seem as "take-over no matter what" as DID does, which makes it healthy, which definitely is the key word here. DID is hiding, in a sense, because my two-year-old brain learned to hide to escape trauma. Multiplicity, in the sense you describe it, seems like a way to say, "I may need a little help here, so these are my guides, and they make everything better." It's not hiding as much as sharing, maybe? And yeah, I have a Real Fucking Problem, but so do most of us. I don't bitch about it too often (though I do mean to journal tonight...), but it's a daily thing for me. The memories come back in horrid flashes, but find me someone who hasn't had at least one bad thing happen to them, right?

I'm a trained opera singer, so I know acting. And acting helps. But I'm not sure multiplicity = acting. I mean, I've been able to have other personalities sing roles for me if THEY wanted to, but I'd say Healthy Multiplicity is more coping than "pretending." I don't see it as pretending, I guess. And I know I couldn't act my way into DID if the fucking Academy asked me to.

You can argue with them? That's intriguing to me, because it's very DID-like in THAT regard. I can argue with Ruby. I'll often find notes from her to me, and write her back, and we go on and on. But it's not in my head as much as it is on paper. When she's in my head, she's either 1)watching, or 2)taking over completely. But that does seem like a bit of a similarity - again, minus the time loss bit.

But I'm not sure that multiplicity is a BAD thing if it helps you cope. Is it healthy? I mean, I don't know. If you succumb to it completely and aren't YOU, then yeah, bad thing. If you can't be logical as YOU, you've crossed into a pretty "hard to get out of" territory. Do you see a psych? Does that ever come up?

Ahh, illness fakers. My favorite people. I love when people are "sick" because it gives them attention, or makes them seem cool, or xyz excuse. People like that disgust me. Don't fake or compare. Just - exist with what you have. Figure it out. Don't be a dick. Why people want to fake bipolar or DID is so utterly disgusting. And I can spot them from a mile away. Though I do have some internal help with that...

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

It is more coping than pretending in the cases where I have to apply it to do what husband and I call CWS. Cope With Shit. It stems from pretending, but it was so powerfully protective that I started doing it harder, stuffing more and more of my "real" self under that blanket whenever pushed into that reaction. And I can still see myself doing it. I have a feeling I don't know how to deal with? Well, what alter ego/character do I have lying around who has dealt with something like it? Switch to that channel, process the feeling AS the imaginary person ABOUT the imaginary event. And, remarkably, that processes the REAL feeling. It may not resolve the feelings around actual bad events -- fights with friends, losing a pet; those are specific real-world things, and pretending might remove some of the immediate feelings for a while, but they will come back and the time is better spent actually processing the real thing as the real me. But I'm mentally ill, and I have a lot of feelings that don't come from any real world source. Depression, anxiety, they come from nowhere. They will CHOOSE a thing to latch onto, but that's a different feeling, and I've learned to recognize it. And the just letting go and becoming someone else for a bit is pretty effective at offsetting that. Anxiety about real things, like medical issues, interpersonal issues, and the like, those I tend to deal with by talking TO my imaginary people. And those conversations are very, very real, in that they will often say things that I don't think I, as me, would ever have thought to say, or been willing to say even if I had. And it's often really uncomfortable. :/

It's all a very weird arrangement, and it undeniably works fairly well, it seems healthy to me.

I see a psych, but it's free health care and you get what you pay for. There's no discussion of issues. It's basically "How do you feel? Need refills? Here. Get out of my office. NEXT." I'd hoped for more, but . . . no. My therapist is good, at least.