Category: Dissociative survivors’ experiences
Dissociative survivors' experiences
Latest
Making the most of your GP Appointment
‘I’m not seeing a doctor!’ I insisted with a look on my face that was intended to end the debate...
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Three types of trigger … Three techniques for taming
All I did was walk into the kitchen and pick up a cloth. But the sudden waft of bleach flung me far, far back into some childhood memory. I switched to a traumatised part of myself. I had been ‘triggered’.
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My therapist is retiring
My therapist is retiring next year. I’ve worked with her for nearly five years and I’m not ready to finish therapy yet, so this is a difficult issue for me. Having spoken to PODS, I’ve realised that many other people face the same or similar situations, so I thought I’d write about how it’s impacting me and how I’m dealing with it. But I have DID, so I have a variety of responses…
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Living in a Glass Bubble
I was abused by my dad, and also my grandad. And in many ways, I want to just leave it there and...
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Managing Medical Procedures
It might have been ‘just a routine blood test’ but that didn’t stop me passing out. Again. From a...
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Divorcing old habits
What do you do when the worst thing you think could happen to you does happen? Do you fall back into old habits, ways of coping that you’ve worked so hard to reform? Or do you work the problem? … In this searingly honest and vulnerable piece, Carolyn Spring talks about how she coped with a double loss of attachment figures and how what she had feared the most actually became a springboard towards new growth.
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Can we heal?
‘Can we heal?’ she asked, quivering with the significance of what she was saying, as if her very life depended on it. ‘Can we really heal?’I could well understood the agony in her eyes. I lived for many years overwhelmed by trauma, the symptoms of unhealed suffering. And if recovery is impossible, then why are we even trying?
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Ten roadblocks to recovery
Recovery from trauma is a difficult process but what are the specific things that can get in the way?
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It’ll be alright on the night – my experience of sex after abuse
After sexual abuse, it’s very common to have difficulties in your sexual relationship. But is that just the way that it is and we have to just accept it? Or is there a way towards a fulfilling sex life after trauma?
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‘Don’t make me vomit slowly’ – my experience of phase two work
When I first started therapy in 2006, I didn’t know much about trauma and nothing about ‘the three phase approach’. My counsellor didn’t know much more. So although I’d like to say that we started by carefully doing the Phase 1 work of safety and stabilisation, the reality was a great deal messier than that.
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Recovery is my best revenge
Is recovery possible? That’s the question that everyone is asking, even when they’re not asking it. After a breakdown, perhaps after years in the mental health system, do we have to simply accept that we’re broken and that we’ll always be broken, or is it possible to live a life where we’re back in control again, where we’re living as we want to live, where life has purpose and meaning?
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Suicide – to be or not to be
I could cope with it no longer. Every part of me—eyelids, throat, bowels—everything was clenched tight in a ball of furious unbearability. This feeling—such a feeling!—loomed up over me like some prehistoric sea-monster, ready to snap me up and devour me, ready to pilfer my bones and pick apart my brain. This feeling was too much.
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Ten things I have learned about child sexual abuse
Understanding the dynamics around child sexual abuse, who the perpetrators are, how they achieve their ends, the impacts of abuse on us—all of this knowledge, this ‘psycho-education’ has aided my recovery. And so these are ten of the many things that I have learned about child sexual abuse, some of the insights that have begun to heal my shame.
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My experience of living with DID: denial
Denial and dissociation are two sides of the same coin. In employing dissociation, we are employing denial: “This isn’t happening” or “This isn’t happening to me.” We create alter personalities to whom it happened, so that it didn’t happen to me.
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Parts are only part of the problem
I have dissociative identity disorder. I have many separate, distinct and unique ‘parts’ of my...
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It’s a pain: the physical impact of trauma
Physical symptoms are a big part of life for me with DID. Yes, I have ‘multiple personalities’, the “two or more distinct identities that recurrently take control of the body” and I’m not for one moment denying the significance of that or the impact it has on my day-to-day life. But I would say that physical symptoms such as chronic, unexplained pain, headaches and nausea have been and still remain far more distressing and life-impacting for me than the presence of parts.
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Who am I? – Questions of identity in dissociative identity disorder
I look up and I am in my therapist’s room. I look up and I am in the cafe area of the shopping mall. I look up and I am in bed in the dark. I look up and I don’t know if I am I. There is no thread of continuity between these places, these experiences. Who am I now, writing this, re-reading this, re-writing this?
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Powerlessness
Powerlessness is such a core experience for victims of abuse that often we don’t even notice that it’s there. It is played out in the way that we interact with people and the world – it’s the shadow cast by the sun, rather than the sunlight itself.
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A life worth living
I knew a lot about pain, but I didn’t know very much at all about pleasure. I asked myself: what do I like doing? For weeks I couldn’t answer that question, not with anything tangible or concrete.
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What is it like to be me? – I am DID
Each day me – tip-toeing through life (your life, your world, your complex unknowable system of rules and experiences), a desperate yet futile quest to hide my oddness.
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The body remembers
I hate my body. It was there, always there, during the abuse. My mind went away but my body could not. My mind could forget. We parcelled up little chunks of our mind, bit by bit, and sent them off into dim little rooms where they could be forgotten and not heard.
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